by Rosie Thomas
Disliking Suzanne, steadily hating her, had made a guilty cloud that still hung around May. But feeling regret for driving her away didn’t make any difference to her mistrust and resentment of Leonie – who was married, who shouldn’t look at her father in just that way, which only May seemed to notice.
Ivy shrugged it off, if she was aware of it at all. ‘Don’t use your imagination so much,’ she told her sharply when May tried to share her anxiety.
And if she concentrated on this place, on the vacation itself, she only became miserably aware of her inability to fit in. The tennis and the barbecuing and beach volleyball jollity generated by the Beams made her shrivel up. She was too fat, too awkward and too used to being unhappy. But May didn’t recognise her unhappiness for what it was, merely having a sense that there was something the matter with her – for which she could only blame herself.
There were the old people, she grudgingly acknowledged, Elizabeth and the Fennymores, who had tried to be kind to her. But May didn’t welcome kindness because of the accompanying suspicion that people felt sorry for her. If only she could be like Ivy, who was slick and thoughtless, and dismissed what she didn’t care for with a shrug and a single sarcastic lift of her plucked eyebrows.
May sat down heavily on the grass bank, shuffling her back up against a convenient wooden post. She drew up her knees and rested her forehead on them, staring down at the blades of grass between her feet. The enormity of everything, all the countless profusion of grass stalks, and beads of moisture and minute insects, was suddenly terrifying. May rocked her head on her bent knees and screwed up her eyes to ease the burning behind them.
More and more often she found herself thinking about Doone. The sense of collusion, the feeling that she was following Doone’s footprints clearly printed in the sand or the grass, grew steadily stronger in her mind.
The first time she had read the diary she had gone straight through it, devouring every page, unable to disentangle herself from the fascination it exerted. Even though she now knew some of the passages almost by heart she still found it hard to extricate herself from Doone’s wild scribblings. The night before, she had gone through every entry yet again – those she could decipher, at least – sitting up late on the French bed and staring at the now-familiar handwriting. The scrambled numbers still danced in front of her eyes, maddening her with what she could not interpret. If Doone had left these messages for her, why was it that she couldn’t read them?
There was also the woman on the island. The image of her returned to May as often as the thought of Doone, so that the two of them became connected and inseparable in her mind. The picture came back now, superimposing itself on the canvas of grass and moss. A pale woman in loose, colourless clothes. Standing still, watching and waiting.
Sometimes May convinced herself that she had been just a picnicker, someone who had landed a boat on the seaward side and walked over the hump of wooded land to the bay beach. Perhaps she had been resting in the shade of the trees before making the scramble back to her friends or her husband, her children even, waiting by their sailing dinghy for her to come back from her explorations.
At other times, when she lay awake in Doone’s bed following with her eyes the cracks in the ceiling, she knew that the woman was different, nothing to do with the bright and wholesome holiday place that was dominated by the Beams. The white oval of the woman’s face and her very stillness had been too alien. She was part of the water and the fog, and the low, brooding hump of the island itself. In some way she belonged with Doone, or Doone belonged to her.
Aaron Fennymore had said that the Beach was resistant to rational explanation. The words stuck in May’s head, scratching her with an insistent point of fear.
Someone was coming across the road. May looked up and saw Elizabeth.
‘Good morning, May. Are you busy or would you like some company?’
She was wearing a straw hat, although the sun still hadn’t burnt away the last layers of mist, and a waisted dress printed with little flowers. May liked the way she looked and her old-fashioned politeness that managed to be quaint without being weird. ‘It’s okay. I don’t look busy, do I?’ She scrambled up and scrubbed at the wet seat of her shorts.
‘Perhaps we should take a walk together.’
May gave a nod and a shrug, and fell into step beside Elizabeth. They turned along the road in the direction of Pittsharbor. May found it a relief not to be looking towards the crazy peaks of the Beams’ roof and the dark timbers of the Captain’s House, which seemed to suck in the light. Further on in this direction there were cottages in the woods, with towels drying on rails and couples putting cool-boxes in their cars, and ordinary families with little kids and babies in strollers. It was nice, with a friendly feeling. She felt suddenly that she shouldn’t walk on beside Elizabeth without saying something appropriately companionable. She racked her brains, then asked, ‘Do you like having your son up here to stay with you?’
‘Yes, I do.’ Elizabeth adjusted her hat and May saw the inside of her arm, the loose white skin seamed with thin spreading veins. ‘But he has to go back to Boston unexpectedly this afternoon. Some business he must see to at his picture gallery.’
The way she glanced away and settled her face again, levelling her chin with determination, made it clear to May even in the depths of her own self-absorption that Elizabeth was lonely. ‘That’s a shame.’
May wondered what she was doing on her own up here if it made her lonely and the speculation led her to reflect that the adults she knew mostly didn’t seem to suffer from loneliness. They had partners and friends, and complicated lives filled with choices, as her father and Ivy did. Being lonely had seemed an immature problem, most specifically her own. ‘Do you stay here all summer?’
‘I do, nowadays. I like to look after the garden, because my mother loved it so much. I told you that, didn’t I? When my husband was still alive we came only seldom, because he liked to go to Europe and to visit his sister in Virginia, and there was only so much time. He was a lawyer, you know. A busy man. Then, very soon after he retired, he was taken ill. He died six months after that.’
‘I’m sorry,’ May mumbled. She was thinking how horrible it must be to be old, a widow like Elizabeth or Marian Beam, or frail like the Fennymores. Once you had grown out of the horribleness of being a child, which must surely happen some day, how long did you have before it closed in again as old age? The seeming pointlessness of it all weighed down on her, so that her feet dragged beside Elizabeth’s brisk steps. Doone had written something like this in the diary, she remembered. It was one of the crazy despairing bits, when her exhilaration had evidently deserted her. She would read it again when she was back in her room.
They walked on to a point where they could see the whole of the bay. The sun was stronger now and the island shimmered in nothing more than a faint haze. It would be a warm afternoon, perhaps even hot. Looking back over her shoulder from the top of the steps May could see a rowboat beached on the island sand. Perhaps Lucas and Ivy had gone out to their hollow together. Imagining them, May felt a contraction in her stomach and a shiver of nausea.
‘Let’s go on this way, shall we?’ Elizabeth pointed down the road and May could only nod, silenced by misery. As they walked, she listened to Elizabeth talking about what it had been like to spend summers here when she was a girl.
Half a mile further on, set back under the shade of some crooked spruce trees, stood a little saltbox shack that had been turned into a restaurant named the Flying Fish. There was a blackboard at the roadside with the day’s dishes chalked on it, and a couple of tables crammed on the narrow front porch.
‘I used to play with the kids who lived here,’ Elizabeth said. ‘They’ve all moved away now. It’s been the Flying Fish for about ten years. Shall we stop for a drink?’
‘Okay. Please let me buy you one.’ For once, May had some dollar bills folded in her pocket. Enough, she calculated.
‘Why, thank yo
u,’ Elizabeth said.
They sat at one of the porch tables. Bright sunlight suddenly made the shadows inky dark. Until this minute neither of them had noticed that the moan of the foghorn had stopped.
‘Iced tea for me, please. They have good jelly doughnuts,’ Elizabeth advised.
‘Just a Coke. Diet Coke.’
‘You’ll fade away.’
‘I don’t think so.’
When the waitress had put their drinks in front of them Elizabeth asked gently, ‘Is something wrong?’
May was exhausted. Even if she had wanted to, how could she specify one thing when it was everything? ‘No, Nothing.’
‘Are you sure?’
The concern in the old woman’s face affected her, all the pursed lines around her ladylike mouth and the wattly flesh of her throat pulling with the effort to be kind but not intrusive. May was afraid she might, embarrassingly, cry again. It was unthinkable to mention even John or Ivy and Lucas, let alone the feeling she was always trying to hide and duck away from, that the insides of herself were wrong and guilty, and less adequate than everyone else’s.
‘May?’
For the sake of saying something, deflecting this concern at all costs, she blurted out desperately, ‘I saw a woman on the island.’
Elizabeth leaned forward and took a slow sip of her iced tea. At this range May could see that tiny filaments of her lipstick had bled into the furrows around her lips. Then she lifted her head again and their eyes met. ‘What kind of a woman?’
‘I don’t know. Just … just a woman. Pale, with her hair all scraped back. Funny clothes, I guess. She was just standing looking at me.’
To her surprise Elizabeth nodded, as if she knew already.
A noisy family group came up the steps all together and banged in through the screen door to the interior of the restaurant. When they had gone, Elizabeth looked away towards the road and Pittsharbor. An RV passed with three bicycles bracketed on the back. ‘Have you ever been in love?’ Elizabeth asked softly.
May blew angrily through the straw in her Coke. Being in love was what Ivy went in for, and the thin girls in her class who whispered endlessly about boys and dating. ‘No.’
What she felt about Lucas was beyond love, at least the way Ivy and the others defined it. It was fascinating and appalling, and he had barely directed five words to her. She wished she could free herself from it, but it had wound her in its tentacles and she could not.
Elizabeth was still staring away down the road, the fingers of one hand gripping her glass of tea. ‘I fell in love for the first time when I was your age,’ she said, so quietly that May had to lean forward to hear. ‘Or perhaps I was a year or so older. Of course, we were less sophisticated then. We didn’t know all the things that you young women seem to take for granted now.’
‘I don’t think I know much,’ May said, and the tone of her voice made Elizabeth smile at her. ‘Tell me about it,’ May asked.
‘I will, if you think it would be interesting.’
May didn’t think it would, particularly, but she was glad to settle for anything that spared her from having to talk and therefore risk the ignominy of tears.
Elizabeth repeated, ‘I was so young. Perhaps nothing that happens to us afterwards in life ever quite matches the intensity of that first falling in love. Nothing, not marriage nor having children nor acquiring age and experience.’
Her gaze had turned inwards, May saw. She was looking at something that was no longer there.
It had been a day not very different from this one, misty at first, then shimmering with the afterthought of heat. Elizabeth clearly remembered the dress she was wearing. It was crisp linen, banana yellow, with a full skirt and cuffed short sleeves, which flattered the smooth, summer-golden skin of her forearms. Bought with her mother on a shopping trip to New York and put on for the first time for her grandparents’ party.
It was a luncheon for Maine friends and families, most of whom Elizabeth had known from childhood. There had been white sailcloth canopies slung from ribboned poles to shade the garden, and English silver porringers filled with white and yellow roses to decorate the tables. The house had been scented with lavender and filled with music from the piano in the evening room, and the women’s heels had clicked out an intermezzo on the old wooden floors.
Elizabeth had drunk her first glass of champagne as a birthday toast to her grandmother, the Senator’s wife, and after the speeches, as she had dreamed all day of doing, she wandered away from the heart of the party to the kitchen where the cook and two maids were working. From there it was only a short step through the side door to the back of the house facing away from the hammered-metal sea. A line of cars was parked there, two or three of them attended by lounging chauffeurs. Elizabeth slipped past them into the lane and began to walk slowly in her ankle-strap high-heeled shoes, feeling the eye of the afternoon sun fixed on her head. She had turned in the opposite direction from Pittsharbor and now she passed the Captain’s House. A low whistle stopped her in her tracks.
He was waiting for her in what had become their place. The house was empty and dilapidated, because the old woman who was the captain’s daughter had died in the spring. Pittsharbor talk had it that the place had been bought for a summer cottage by rich people from off, but there was no sign of them as yet. In the meantime, Elizabeth and the boy had found a screen and an inner door that they could prise open, so the whole house was their domain.
He held the door ajar now, and she ran across the turf and up the sagging steps so that he caught her and snapped the door shut behind them. For a long second they stood looking at one another, the gloom of the house shifting and re-forming into welcoming shadows as their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness.
He kissed her then, tasting the champagne foreign in her mouth.
For weeks, ever since the beginning of the summer when Elizabeth had come up from Boston with her mother, they had been waiting and watching for opportunities to meet in the old house. Their meetings happened seldom enough, because Elizabeth had to explain every absence and the boy had his work to do, but today was perfect. Everyone at the house was busy with the party and the tide had brought the fishing boats back early.
‘You look so pretty,’ he told her, and ran the tips of his fingers over her shoulders and down to her breasts. The yellow dress had a row of tiny covered buttons, and he bit his lower lip between his teeth and stopped breathing as he undid them one by one. Elizabeth thought of the protests she should make, but even as the thought came she gasped and abandoned it, letting her head fall back against the peeling wall.
They had done this before; when the two of them had grown bruised and sticky with kissing he had touched and stroked her breasts with his salt-cracked fingers. He had been almost too gentle, and without properly understanding her hunger Elizabeth had snatched his hands in her own and greedily bitten and sucked at them. She had licked the cuts made by running lines and gutting knives, and the punctures from fish-hooks until he had muttered roughly, ‘Don’t, don’t you do that.’
Today was different. They hadn’t talked about why, but they both silently accepted that the difference was momentous.
In the corner of the room he had spread a rug on the bare boards and a pillow with a split in the seam that exposed the feather innards. He took her hand now and led her towards it. The seaward windows were sealed with storm shutters but cracks had opened in the old wood and they let in long streaks of light to lie like fuzzy blades on the floor. When they knelt and faced each other a few puffs of goose-down escaped from the pillow and floated like minuscule clouds. Elizabeth’s arms rested on his shoulders, and with careful movements he lifted the rustling folds of linen and slid his hands up her thighs.
She shifted a little, hesitant, then yielding. Their mouths met again, familiar after weeks of touching but wider now and wetter, until each of them felt they might slip down the other’s throat and be swallowed up for ever.
A minute later, it s
eemed, the yellow dress had been dropped to one side and Elizabeth lay back naked with one hand crooked to pillow her head. She had imagined this moment, and feeling ashamed and exposed, but now she was wiser she understood that neither shame nor exposure was at issue. Nor were questions of right and wrong. This was right and it was what she wanted.
He knelt between her spread knees, as naked as she was, his hair as black as ship’s tar and his beaky tanned face taut with longing and concentration. He was holding himself with one hand as if he was afraid he might spill too soon. ‘Is it what you want?’
She hadn’t felt herself to be the leader in any of their doings before this minute. He was two years older and belonged here with the rocks and currents of the shoreline, and he knew and was able to do much more than she ever would because she was a pampered city girl. But still by some alchemy she had become the navigator and the helmsman now. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is.’
Looking at his face and the muscled lines of his body she thought she would melt with love. She lifted her hips, her eyes slanting with a smile, offering herself to him. With a helpless groan he pushed himself into her.
It hurt. The pain of it took her completely by surprise. She turned her head aside, biting her tongue and the inside of her mouth, staring over his heaving shoulder at the walls marked with the ghostly outlines of pictures and furniture. For an instant the room seemed full of ghosts who crowded in to watch her crossing into womanhood. Suddenly fear unfolded terrible wings in her stomach. She gasped, ‘Be careful. Please be careful.’
He was already shuddering. He shouted something she couldn’t decipher and pulled away from her, and she lay motionless with her eyes wide open as he ejaculated. Afterwards she held his head in her arms, strands of his sweat-soaked hair caught in her mouth. The pain had gone as quickly as it had come and her fear had subsided with it. Nothing that happened now, whatever there was in the future, could take this moment from them.