by Rosie Thomas
Marian was introducing the old people to John. ‘This is Aaron and Hannah Fennymore. Your neighbours from the opposite end of the beach, John.’
The woman was about the same age as Elizabeth Newton, but she looked completely different. She had none of Elizabeth’s stately bearing or gracious manner. Hannah Fennymore was small and bent-backed, dressed in layers of nondescript brown and grey clothes as if the evening were cold instead of soft and mild. She was sharp-eyed and inquisitive-looking, rather like a small busy bird.
The man, her husband, must once have been tall and imposing. He was bent now, too, and a stick lay on the floor beside his chair. He had white hair, long and a little unkempt, which stood out around his hollow, beaky face like a lion’s mane. Everyone, even the boys, stepped carefully when they came near Aaron.
The Fennymores were Mainers, not weekenders or summer visitors. They lived all the year round up on the bluff.
At last, feeling more confident, May slipped into a seat near Elizabeth.
‘I remember parties at this house in the nineteen-thirties and forties,’ Elizabeth murmured to her, as if they were resuming a conversation they had broken off only minutes before, not a full day and a half ago. May liked the implied intimacy of this. ‘Long before Dickson Beam bought the place. Marian makes believe the Beams have been here for ever, but they’re just newcomers, really.’
‘What were they like, the parties?’
‘They were grand affairs, for a summer cottage. Everyone in evening clothes, a uniformed maid. Of course, the house looked quite different then. Marguerite Swayne wouldn’t recognise it if she saw it now. Mr Swayne was a friend of my grandfather’s. They were an old family. Their money was in fruit shipping: bananas, up from Jamaica.’
May scratched at an inflamed bite on her ankle, half-closing her eyes and trying to conjure up the scene. Movie images of marcel-waved ladies foxtrotting with gentlemen in white gloves danced in front of Joel and Kevin Beam. The pictures clashed with May’s own much darker impression of the beach and its houses. Another face swam by, drowned features framed by tendrils of wet hair. Water blotted out the dancing couples.
Elizabeth was saying, ‘This house was built ninety years ago by the Swaynes, at about the same time as my paternal grandfather bought our parcel of land. He was Senator Maynard Freshett. His family business was timber, lumber mills. There’s a rather forbidding portrait of him in my dining-room, but he was the kindest man. My mother brought me up here every summer to visit her parents-in-law, from the time I was two years old. Her family were from Portland, originally, but her mother died when she was just a girl.’
May nodded politely. ‘Who else lived here in those days?’
‘When I was a child?’ Elizabeth laughed briefly, showing the soft crow’s-foot skin beneath her jaw. ‘Aaron, Mr Fennymore did, for one. Not in the house along there, that came later. His people lived back in Pittsharbor.’
‘What was their family business?’
Elizabeth gave her a quick glance. Then she touched her throat with the tips of her fingers, as if needing the powdered wrinkles as a reminder that the skin was an old woman’s. ‘Fishing. His father and grandfather were fishermen.’
May wondered if she had inadvertently strayed on to some sort of forbidden ground. She didn’t like the look of Aaron Fennymore very much. He was stern, yet alarmingly frail – ill-looking. As if he might die or something.
Marian clapped her hands and walked between the groups. She was wearing a tiered hippie skirt and the toenails of her faintly grubby feet were painted ripe purple. ‘Everything’s ready, plates are right here. You have to help yourselves, now, no ceremony. We’re just family, John.’
Aaron Fennymore’s white head jerked and his wife patted his hand. ‘I’ll fix you a plate,’ she soothed him.
‘Go on,’ Elizabeth said to May. ‘You’ll be hungry.’
‘Not really,’ May said coldly, while her stomach clamoured for hamburger.
The food was barbecued with some aplomb by Tom Beam, aided by Lucas, and served up by Lucas’s laid-back friends from Pittsharbor. Leonie always let Tom do the cooking. He ran two successful restaurants in Boston, and he had precise ideas about the right way to do anything connected with food. She sat back in one of the canvas loungers, wondering vaguely when the salt-rotted fabric would finally tear apart and deposit her on the deck. The size of the gathering allowed her to feel that for once she needn’t make a particular effort to be cheerful and talkative. No one would notice if she withdrew and let her thoughts wander.
Everyone had eaten and Tom made regular circuits of the adults with the bottles of Californian Merlot. Lucas and his friends, and his sister Gail and Ivy, drank beer. Marian looked pleased with her success in having been the one to draw the new people into the little society of the bluff. They would be her protégés now and she liked that.
Marian had stopped to listen courteously to something Elizabeth Newton was saying. Leonie knew that privately Marian considered Elizabeth to be an old Boston snob and an anachronism, but she was always polite to her in public. Maybe they were talking about the land behind the beach and the development. Elizabeth’s son Spencer and his partner wanted to buy a piece to build condominiums, but Aaron owned it and flatly refused to sell. Elizabeth tried to promote Spencer’s cause whenever she could and she was well aware that Marian’s relationship with the Fennymores was more cordial than her own.
Leonie drew up her knees and rested her chin on them. She was happy watching without having to respond to anyone. She saw her husband lean down to say something to Karyn and their physical likeness struck her all over again. All Marian’s children resembled her and one another. Their wide, handsome faces with broad foreheads and big noses might have come from the same mould. Karyn was dark like her mother, whereas Tom had inherited his father’s sandy fairness and prominent chin, but they were unmistakably brother and sister. They laughed now, the same noisy burst of amusement that was the signature sound of Beam family gatherings. Leonie’s gaze travelled on at once.
The sky over the sea had turned pistachio green and now the light was fading into navy-blue darkness. The teenagers had begun to talk about taking a boat out to the island and lighting a fire, so they could carry on their own party there.
‘Aw, c’mon, we’ve done it plenty before,’ Joel was protesting to Tom and Marian.
Leonie did not try to intervene. The older of the two sisters from the Bennisons’ place was as graceful as a gazelle, but she was wearing too much make-up for a summer’s evening and her eyes were bold to the point of hardness. The younger one with the round, sweet face hovered watchfully at one side. She kept tugging at the hem of her shorts as if she wanted to cover herself up. Leonie wondered how long ago their mother had died.
Their father moved around the circle, making a polite point of talking to everyone. He had sat for a long time with the Fennymores and now he was nodding in the midst of a brief conversation with Elliot. Watching them, Leonie reached down and groped unseeingly for the glass of wine beside her chair. She finished what was left of it, her third of the evening. She didn’t often drink more than one. Abstemiousness over food and drink was part of her carefulness, her exercising of control in all the areas of her life that remained susceptible to control.
The children began a shift down the beach steps. Marian and Tom moved in their wake, issuing warnings and instructions. The sea was calm and the tide was right, so they had been given permission to row across to the island. Leonie saw how the younger Duhane girl waited until her sister motioned her on with a hitch of her chin. Then she followed on after Kevin and Joel, who took no notice of her. They clattered down the steps and out of sight and the adults came back into the circle, simultaneously smiling and shaking their heads.
‘They’ll be okay. You can’t stop them doing everything because of what happened,’ Tom proclaimed to no one in particular.
‘May I sit here?’ someone asked.
Leonie turned her head and saw it was Jo
hn Duhane. She was convinced that he had taken care to talk to everyone else except her because he had been saving her until last. ‘Please do.’
At first, he didn’t say anything at all. They sat in companionable silence watching the glow of candles around the deck and as the quiet stretched between them Leonie let her head fall back once more against the salty chair canvas. A thin wire loosened between her shoulder-blades and her breathing steadied. The murmur of the sea grew louder.
When he did speak it was in a low voice that she had to turn her head to hear. He was telling her his daughters had been reluctant to make this trip and how pleased he was that there were other young people for them to be with. ‘Vacations have been the hardest part to deal with since their mother died.’ He spoke softly but without hesitation.
‘How long ago?’
‘Four years now.’
‘I’m sorry. They must miss her. And you must too,’ she added hastily, disconcerted to discover that she sounded clumsy.
John was sitting on the edge of the decking. He reached down to the coarse grass arching beside his ankle and pinched a blade between his thumb and forefinger.
‘One of the babes is crying,’ Marian called. There was a nursery alarm plugged in close to the porch door. Karyn swayed past and the hem of her skirt brushed over John’s arm. A moment later she came out again with Ashton in her arms. His dark pin-curled head lolled and his thumb was wedged in his mouth. Over her shoulder his wet saucer eyes blinked at the world with tearful reproach.
John moved a little to one side, but Leonie sat motionless with her hands locked behind her head. ‘They’re beautiful children,’ he said. ‘You don’t believe they will ever grow up, do you? But they do. They grow up and they stop thinking you’re the best person in the world. Overnight you become the enemy.’
Leonie followed his surprised gaze as Karyn went to Elliot. Elliot took the bundle of damp baby and unconcernedly rocked it and went on talking. She made a small sound that might have been laughter, or something altogether different. ‘Oh, I see. You thought they were mine? From the beach, yesterday morning? No, they’re Karyn’s kids. Elliot’s her partner, obviously. My husband is Tom.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It’s a natural assumption to make, a woman with a baby in her arms.’
‘So which of all those children are yours?’
‘None of them. Tom and I don’t have any.’
‘Ah.’
Leonie stood up. A spoon that had been hidden in the folds of her skirt clattered to the decking but no one looked round. She retrieved it and replaced it with the others. ‘Will you come for a walk on the beach? Just ten minutes?’ she asked abruptly, without having pre-planned the invitation in her mind.
‘Of course.’
They crossed the deck and descended the steps without anyone seeming to notice their withdrawal.
Once they were there, Leonie kicked off her sandals and hooked her forefinger through the straps. The sand was pleasantly cool and coarse underfoot. They began to walk, side by side, their heads bent.
‘I wanted children,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I wanted a family.’ Even the word itself had become taboo, so that it lay unwieldy on her tongue. ‘But I couldn’t. I had all the tests. The problem was me, not Tom. We tried the … the alternative methods. Quite a lot were undignified, most of them painful, all of them were expensive. None worked. I sound sorry for myself, don’t I?’
John listened, but said nothing.
‘We were told to consider adoption, but Tom didn’t want to do that. He felt it wasn’t right for him. So. No children.’
‘I’m sorry, I made a clumsy mistake.’
‘Don’t be. I said, it was natural enough. I’m spilling all this out probably because … because of the wine.’
Laughter and the splash of oars travelled across the water to them. Two boats were making their way out to the island.
‘Why don’t you and Tom take your vacations somewhere else?’
She was taken aback for a moment. The question leapfrogged further than she had been prepared for. ‘Oh, it’s a movie, isn’t it? The beach, the island… that house, Maine itself. It’s woven into all of them, a picture, that was what Marian wanted. It’s her oeuvre. Family, grandchildren, the tradition of all the summers. Tom wouldn’t consider cutting us out of the celluloid.’
‘Not even for your sake?’
Leonie considered in all seriousness, wishing to do her husband justice. At length she said, ‘No.’ It was the truth; it was so important to Tom that the two of them should remain part of this extended family. The connection compensated him for the lack of his own children, even as comparisons deepened the sense of loss and failure for her. ‘It isn’t so much to ask, you know. It’s just a summer vacation. Some tennis, a couple of barbecues. Aunt Leonie and Uncle Tom. In the winter we go on a ski trip, usually with friends. Last year we went to the Caribbean …’
She knew that she protested too much. It was part of a contract she had agreed with herself, to be as positive as she could manage. There seemed no way, any more, to give expression to the desperation and craving and sense of futility that were all her body did manage to breed. At the beginning, in the first years, she had talked – ranted, sobbed – to Tom about her longing to conceive. But now, driven into blankness, they hardly ever even mentioned it. Except maybe as the bitterest, the most oblique of jokes at their joint expense.
Although she had told John Duhane the bare facts, Leonie couldn’t have conveyed to him or anyone else how it felt to hold Ashton or Sidonie in her arms. The simultaneous longings to smother them, to inhale the scent of their skin and hair to the point of narcolepsy, to hurl them aside, to rake and pummel her own disobliging flesh… I’m crazy, Leonie thought. Raving. There’s no hope for me… She grinned in the darkness. There was relief in acknowledging her madness.
An onshore breeze had sprung up, and it blew a hank of hair across her face and flattened her skirt against her thighs. Being at the beach made her crazier, being inundated with babies and pounded by teenagers and chewed up by the clan of Beams, up here where everything was so god-damn clean and healthy and salt-scoured and plain … at least back in the city there was dirt and confusion, and work, and even a couple of women friends who had elected not to have babies …
She laughed now, a low noise that made John look sideways at her tucked-in face. ‘Something funny?’
He touched her wrist, guided her around a mooring chain snaked over the shingle. She resisted an impulse to take his hand.
‘In a way. Tell me about your girls.’ She wanted to ask about his wife.
‘They’re growing up.’
‘They would do, in the end.’
They reached the far point of the beach, where the steps led up towards the Pittsharbor road. Leonie had the sense that John was also thinking of Doone Bennison, who had not grown up in the end.
Which was worse, she wondered, for the thousandth time, to have had a child and lost her, or never to have had one at all? She didn’t know, any more than she had known on the afternoon a year ago when the fisherman brought Doone’s body ashore. She had been there, with a brown bag of shopping and a quart of ice-cream from the Ice Parlour. There had been a flurry down at the dock and one of the men had run forward with a tarpaulin and another had dashed along the harbour wall to the wooden hut where there was a telephone. At the same time there had been a hideous silence, and all the running and hoisting and sluicing of water had seemed to take place in slow motion. They had lifted the body, laid her on the dock and covered her over. Leonie remembered the white hands and feet.
The breeze off the water was cold now. Leonie and John turned and began to retrace their slow steps along the tide-line.
‘I miss their smaller selves,’ John said. ‘Even after Ali died, I was certain I could look after them. Now I don’t believe I know anything. They think I’m the enemy.’
‘You said that before. I’m sure it isn’t
true.’
She had seen the girls, she wasn’t sure of anything of the sort. But you reassured parents about their children, didn’t you? That she was uncertain even of that much made Leonie aware how useless she had become around the whole business. Parents, procreation. Cut off from the chain of heredity, except via aunthood. What was there to do? she wondered. What, exactly?
Out on the island beach two tongues of fire made wavering figures that were answered by fainter reflections in the water. They stopped walking, stood still to watch. The fire torches dipped and a third flame sprang up between them. The young were lighting a bonfire.
‘Looks kind of fun. Do you think they’ll be okay out there?’ John asked.
‘The kids row or windsurf or sail across all the time. The beach on this side is safe enough and there’s not much to go over the top of the island for. A lot of thick scrub, rough ground. Once there was a whalers’ retreat out there and a Native American settlement before that. Plenty of legends about it.’
‘Tell me one.’
‘Ask Hannah Fennymore. She’s the local historian.’
John took this to mean that Leonie didn’t care enough for the place to absorb its history herself. They resumed their walk.
At the foot of the Beams’ steps Leonie said, ‘Come and have a cup of coffee. Or another drink.’ The thought of going in on her own was not inviting. She felt a connection to this man and wanted to hold on to it.
‘Perhaps another evening,’ John said politely. He was half turned towards the island, listening to the murmur of breaking waves.
‘Do you play tennis?’
‘Yes. Not quite championship standard.’
‘Good. Come and play. I need a partner, Tom’s too competitive. Marian likes to see a family tournament.’
‘I’m sure she does.’
They allowed themselves a moment’s sly amusement Oh, God, an ally, Leonie thought. I need an ally so badly.
‘Goodnight. Will you thank Marian for me?’
‘Of course.’ She went up the steps and left John to cross the remaining expanse of shingle to the Captain’s House.