by Rosie Thomas
Ivy left two-thirds of her dinner. The mozzarella solidified into a greasy waxen mass around the chunks of mushroom and pepperoni. Even so, May still eyed it covetously.
‘We’ll do the marketing tomorrow,’ John said. ‘It’ll help us to find our way around.’
‘Great,’ Ivy said without inflexion. She tipped her left-over food into the garbage pail, meticulously removing the traces of her own dinner and touching nothing else. ‘Mind if I go upstairs now?’
The taut thread of John’s patience finally snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake, Ivy, couldn’t you sit here with us for five more minutes? You know, family together time? Talking. Sharing things, the three of us?’
Ivy only stared at him. ‘Fantasy,’ she murmured. ‘I told you all along.’
John stumbled to his feet as if he might hit her.
‘Don’t you,’ Ivy breathed. ‘Don’t you ever.’
There was a silence. He had come close to it sometimes, after Ali had gone, but he never had hit either of them.
Ivy went briskly up the stairs. After a minute they heard music thudding out of her room. May sat still at the table, her bottom lip stuck out in a mixture of embarrassment and depression. John went back into the kitchen with the plates. He stacked them in the dishwasher and rubbed down the counter-top with a folded cloth. Then he poured himself a Jack Daniels. There was no ice yet.
Looking at him, May noticed dejection in the slope of his shoulders. Her father was a big man, broad-backed and still dark with only a few feathers of grey showing in his hair, but in her eyes he suddenly appeared smaller and weaker, the way he might turn out to be when he was really an old man. Although what she actually wanted was to hold back and keep herself safe inside the confines of her own skin, she made herself put her arms around his waist and rest her head on his chest.
‘It will be all right. Ivy’ll get over being mad because you wouldn’t let her stay in the city all summer. We’ll have a good time up here, I know we will.’
The warmth of her gesture was contradicted by a much stronger impulse, which kept her body stiff, micromillimetres removed from him, all the way from her forehead to her knees.
‘I guess so.’
He patted her shoulder and she stepped back in relief. ‘I think it’s stopped raining,’ she offered.
John tilted his whiskey glass in the direction of the doors.
‘Want to come out on the beach? Take a walk before bed?’ Slowly, May shook her head. Knowing that she should have accepted and returned his peace gesture, she wanted more urgently to be on her own in the melancholy stillness of the new bedroom, to lie on the European bed and lose herself in a book.
‘I’m pretty tired tonight. I’ll come tomorrow, okay?’
‘Okay.’ He smiled at her.
He refilled his whiskey glass and opened the door to the beach. As he slid the screen aside and stepped out on to the deck a blast of salt-laden wind hit him full in the face. He shivered and lifted his head. There was a covered porch and sandy wooden steps led down from it to an expanse of soaking grass. John walked carefully, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Rainwater drenched his ankles. Glancing up, he saw a wan moon momentarily revealed by flying clouds.
At the far end of the rough patch of garden was another deck, and a heavy wooden post and rail fence on the seaward side. When he reached it John saw that the fence ran along the top of a low wall of rock. On the other side was a short drop down to the beach. The tide was out and he caught the windborne reek of low water. Only a few years ago he couldn’t have stopped the girls from racing out here to explore, even in the wet darkness. Now the deadness of their indifference weighed them all down.
A gate in the fence gave on to a short flight of rough wooden steps. He took a long pull of whiskey and descended to the beach. Crescents of coarse sand lay between patches of shingle. The stones grated beneath his deck-shoes as he crossed to the water’s edge. Ahead, across the mouth of the little bay, he could see the black hump of an island. John knew from the realtor’s description that this was Moon Island. And so the sheltered beach that faced it was known as Moon Island Beach. On the map it was just one of the dozens of bays and inlets that fretted this part of the Maine coastline.
He stared out towards the island until his eyes smarted in the wind. Then he swung south and began to walk the curve where the waves ran out in murky lacings of foam. Up on the bluff the Captain’s House lay directly behind him. There were four other houses overlooking the sheltered bay, strung in a line to his left. From down here their roofs and gables looked gothic and sinister against the storm clouds, but the lighted windows made cosy little squares of glowing amber.
The tide had turned. A seventh wave ran over his feet and soaked his shoes. He swore and directed his path further up the beach.
Back in the spring John had suggested to his daughters that they should share a last, proper summer vacation before Ivy went to college in California. He had in mind that he would teach the two of them to sail, and they would picnic and barbecue and take cycle rides together along the coastal paths. He and his sister Barbara had enjoyed just such a holiday with their parents thirty years ago.
The girls had protested. But in the end, in their different but equally reluctant ways, they had agreed that they would come.
John had written at once to the local realtors and almost by return, from Pittsharbor, they had received the details of the Captain’s House. It sounded perfect. The house was old and picturesque. The beach was partly sandy, unusually for this section of the coast, and private except for a short length at the southern end. One of the bluff houses was occupied year-round by local people, the others had been owned or rented by the same families for years. Pittsharbor was a pretty fishing town with a thriving artists’ colony. It was busy in the summer season but not yet spoilt.
The woman realtor had been quite direct. ‘It’s an unusual opportunity,’ she told John on the telephone. ‘We almost never get one of these houses becoming available for a summer let. The Bennisons have owned the Captain’s House for – oh, let me think – it must be ten years now. They’re doctors, from Chicago. I’m sorry to say that last summer their daughter, their only child, was tragically killed in an accident up here. The family haven’t yet decided whether or not to sell the house. We have been instructed to find a suitable tenant for the place for this season only.’
‘I see. That’s very sad,’ John said. ‘But I think we’ll take the house. It sounds just what we want.’
The whiskey glass held in the crook of his arm was empty now and he had reached the southernmost end of the beach. There were sailing dinghies and little rowboats beached here, tethered at the extremity of anchor chains that ran from concrete blocks half-buried in the sand. The running tide was just lapping at the bow of one of the dinghies, a fourteen-footer with a white tarpaulin cover that shone in the dark.
A flight of stone steps cut in the sloping headland led from the public part of the beach in the direction of the Pittsharbor village road. John retraced his path up the beach towards the Captain’s House.
The wind had dropped and the house was silent. He turned off the downstairs lights and went slowly up the steep stairs. The girls’ rooms were in darkness, their doors firmly closed. His ears sharpened in the stillness and he heard the old timbers overhead shift and creak, as the house settled itself after the storm.
In the sunshine next morning Leonie Beam stood at the top of the steps and surveyed the beach.
Marian, her mother-in-law, was wading into the sea. Her faded cotton skirt was tucked up out of the water, tight across her generous backside. She was wearing a rakish straw hat and a crumpled white smock, and there was a fat, naked baby hoisted astride one hip.
The sky was pearly, washed by the night’s rain. On a patch of sand scraped by the receding tide Marian and Leonie’s husband Tom had already laid out the day’s paraphernalia. There were canvas chairs and a pair of parasols with their white cotton fringe
s teased by the breeze off the water, sand toys and beach bags and rubber rings, and a rug spread for the babies.
Tom was doing his run. He was at the far end of the beach now, his feet sending up little sparkly silver plumes of spray as he plunged along at the water’s edge. Next he would thud up the stone steps and disappear down the coast road to the village. In Pittsharbor he would buy bagels and newspapers, and come home with snippets of gossip about whom he had seen and what messages they wanted relayed to Marian.
Leonie stood expressionlessly watching him until he reached the end of the beach. Then she went on down the steps and laid her book on one of the canvas chairs.
‘Leonie!’ Marian called to her from knee-deep water. ‘Angel, there you are. What have you been doing? Ashton needs his little sun-hat. Will you find it in the bag there … no, no, the red bag, darling. And bring it to me.’
Leonie obediently paddled out with the hat. Marian swung round and the baby on her hip waved his fists and laughed with delighted pleasure.
‘There’s the boy. Hat on for Grammer, there we are.’ She smoothed the white cotton with a sun-tanned, capable, heavily ringed hand.
Marian Beam was a widow. In her middle sixties she remained handsome, her broad face creased with the lines of a lifetime’s emphatic emotion and marked with the irregular sepia freckles of sun damage. Marian liked to be noticed. She emphasised her large, dark eyes with smudgy charcoal pencil and kept her silvery streaked hair long and flowing. For convenience she pinned it off her face with a series of combs.
Marian loved children. She had had five of her own. Kids were her thing, she often said. And as for grandchildren, well, they were the greatest gift God could bestow. It was her sadness that poor Dickson couldn’t be here to share the joy of seeing them grow up. Dickson was Marian’s late husband. He had died fifteen years before, most probably, Leonie thought, of sheer exhaustion from living alongside Marian for nearly thirty years.
‘You could have married again,’ Leonie remembered saying to Marian years ago, not long after she had married Tom. ‘You were only fifty when Dickson died.’
Marian had smiled luminously. ‘My dear, Dickson was my husband. I couldn’t have thought of anyone else. And I had my boys, and Karyn. I felt rich enough.’
That was how she always talked about them. There were the four boys, of whom Tom was the second, all strapping replicas of their father, and then there was the late, longed-for girl. Karyn was thirty now. She had given her mother plenty of problems but lately she seemed to have settled down. Ashton was her second baby by her live-in partner Elliot. Elliot was black, and the two children were exquisite, plump cafe au lait armfuls.
With the addition of Sidonie and Ashton, Marian now had eleven grandchildren. None of them was from Tom and Leonie.
The two women stood side by side in the water, looking back at the bluff and the houses. The old clapboards and pointed gables were softened by the benign light. Even the tarry dark-stained shingles of the Captain’s House shimmered as if washed with a milky glaze.
The Beams’ was the largest of the five summer cottages overlooking the beach. It stood majestically in the centre, the complicated pitches of its steep roof pierced by dormer windows and surmounted by a widow’s walk. From the flagpole in centre front a faded and frayed American flag twitched in the fitful breeze. Marian always hoisted the flag as soon as she arrived at the beach. Dickson’s flag, she called it.
The house was entirely surrounded at ground level by a wide porch, the home of sagging hammocks and swing seats and surfboards awaiting rehabilitation and windsurfer sails and ancient bicycles, tangled up with driftwood trophies and shells and all the other relics of past holidays. It was just this endless continuity about the place, the silted layers of historical minutiae, which oppressed Leonie.
‘We’ve always done this,’ Tom explained to her at the beginning. ‘Moon Island Beach is embedded inside us all. I can’t imagine spending a summer anywhere else.’
‘Not Europe?’ Leonie had protested. ‘Venice? Tuscany? The French Riviera?’
He had dutifully taken her to Italy for their honeymoon. But the next year, and every year after that, they had returned to the beach. And at the beach house Marian was the matriarch. She presided over daughters-in-law and children and grandchildren like some fertility goddess.
Leonie stirred one leg in the water. She could feel warmer and cooler layers swirling around her calves, cooler on the surface. The storm had stirred everything up. ‘Where is everyone this morning?’ she asked. There was only Sidonie asleep on a towel in the shade of one of the parasols.
‘The kids are playing tennis.’
There were four of them, Lucas and Gail and Joel and Kevin, the children of Marian’s eldest son, Michael. All four of them came out every summer to stay at the beach, just as their parents had done all through their own childhoods. This year, unusually, their mother and father had gone to Europe. ‘And Karyn and Elliot are out in the boat.’
Leonie looked and saw the white mainsail and jib of the Beams’ Flying 15 running out beside the island. She nodded, wondering with a part of her mind exactly how she would occupy herself for this morning, and the afternoon that would follow it, and the nights and days after that. The beach and Marian and the family affected her like this.
A man Leonie didn’t recognise was standing up in front of the Captain’s House and a young woman in a double sliver of bikini was spikily descending the steps. ‘Who are they?’ she asked Marian.
‘They’re the Bennisons’ tenants, I guess. I hope they’re going to be an addition.’
Marian meant an addition to the local texture and colour, to the ever evolving art-form of the family summer holiday.
At the same moment there was a loud whoop from the garden of the Beams’ house, signalling that the tennis was over.
Marian said, ‘Take the babe for me, Leonie,’ and handed over the peachy weight of him without waiting for Leonie’s agreement. She waded out of the water, ready to welcome the older grandchildren, her tucked up skirt revealing navy-blue thickened veins behind her heavy knees.
They came streaming down the beach, headed by a suntanned young man of twenty in tennis shorts and a faded vest. He wore his long hair pulled back in a stringy pony-tail.
‘Lucas,’ Marian called to him, but her eldest grandchild’s attention was elsewhere. He had seen the bikini girl, who was wandering across the shingle and occasionally turning over shells with one languidly pointed toe.
May walked from the window of her bedroom to the door and pressed her knuckles against it, making sure that it was firmly closed. She was repeating a manoeuvre she had made only five minutes earlier but she could not have explained the need to make sure she was alone. She knew the house was empty; she had seen Ivy disappear down the beach steps and John was sitting reading a book on the bench above the sea wall.
With the door closed she felt safe. A fly buzzed against the window-pane. The forlorn room held her enmeshed in its drowsy heat. There were thirteen steps from the door to the window; she had already counted them. Her belongings were unpacked, sparsely laid out on the shelves. There was nothing else to do up here and the sea and the island were bathed with clean blue light. The water of the bay was dotted with cheerful coloured sails. She should put on a swimming costume and go out, like Ivy, into the sunshine.
May had bought a new one-piece from Macy’s. It was red-and-white plaid and she had thought she looked okay in it. A bikini was out of the question and now when she put it on she saw that even this suit showed the cellulite at the top of her legs. She stood for a long moment looking at her torso in the mirror over the dresser, then blindly turned away. If she didn’t go out now she was afraid she never would. She might climb back under the bedcovers and stay there with her knees pulled up to hide her stomach.
The fly had fallen to the window-sill. The buzzing was louder and desperate. May retraced her steps to the door. But when she grasped the handle and pulled it wouldn
’t open. It only shifted slightly, resisting her efforts. It was as if someone else were leaning a shoulder against it. To keep her there, within the stuffy confines of the room.
With her breath catching in her throat May pulled harder. The door suddenly sprang open and she gave a muffled croak of surprise. Without looking back she fled down the stairs and through the screen doors on to the deck. There was an old woman in the garden of the next-door house. She had been bending over a clump of tall blue flowers, but she saw May and stood up, straight-backed, watching her with uncomfortable intentness. Even at this distance May didn’t like it. She ducked her head and ran down the sandy path, rough grass whipping at her ankles.
John looked up from his book. ‘Sun cream,’ he called after her as she raced by.
‘Ivy’ll have some.’
She wanted to get to Ivy. Without thinking, May ran down to the beach. She could see her sister in her bikini, standing gracefully, her weight all balanced on one long leg and angled hip. She was raking back her hair with her fingers and talking to some boys.
When May panted up to her she half-turned, startled, and smiled. ‘This is my sister, May.’
The three boys were standing in a dazzled semi-circle. Of course Ivy drew them like moths with no thought but to incinerate themselves in her flame.
‘This is Lucas, May. And … um …’ She didn’t try to conceal the fact that she hadn’t remembered the names of the others.
‘Joel. And Kevin.’
The middle one fell over himself to supply the information. Ivy gave him a small, considered smile and he blushed. Joel was about sixteen and Kevin a year or so younger. They looked just like the two hundred boys May knew in school in New York, who all wanted to date the same twenty skinny girls. Lucas was different. He was older, perhaps even as old as twenty. He had beige-blond hair pulled back in a pony-tail, a slippery golden tan and a lovers’ knot tattooed on his left bicep. May realised that she was openly staring at him and felt dull colour rising in her face as she dragged her eyes away.