by Rosie Thomas
She handed the coffee cups that had been her mother’s and her grandmother’s before that. They were gold-rimmed with a pattern of blue flowers, and the touch of them and their fragility always gave her satisfaction, even today.
It was time to finalise their arrangements for Pittsharbor Day. The twenty-first of August was only a short time away.
The date was said to be the birthday of Benjamin Pitt, who had arrived at the coast from southern Maine in 1770 with a group of settlers in search of grazing land. There were still Pitts living in the vicinity, but the commemoration of their ancestor had been a date in the local summer calendar for little more than twenty years. It was true that the festival was regarded as something to please the tourists rather than the townspeople themselves, but the summer visitors liked it and it raised some funds for the town, so every year there were fun runs and craft stalls, exhibitions of local artwork in the library and Main Street galleries, and a Fish Fry on the town landing. Bunting was zigzagged across the street and a softball tournament was held on the green alongside the church.
Marian Beam was a great enthusiast for the day. It had become a tradition in the last few years for the houses on the bluff to run a wild blueberry bake stall. Marian had suggested the idea originally and the others had fallen in with her, because baking and selling was in the end easier than playing softball or taking a part in one of Amy Purrit’s Pittsharbor Musical Revues. Marian contributed her energy, her army of family helpers and tubs of wild blueberries bought from one of the farmers on the town road. Elizabeth lent her name and her mother’s recipes, and did some of the baking, but it was Hannah who did the bulk of the work. She was the best cook out of the three of them, although Jennifer Bennison had been a good assistant.
Marian took out a pen and began writing in a notebook. ‘I don’t suppose we can count on the Duhane girls for too much.’
Her pen stopped. The room went so quiet that the sea sounded like the steady pulse of blood in the chambers of their ears. Doone Bennison had drowned on 22 August last year. Elizabeth remembered the bunting flags hanging motionless from their strings as the police vehicle drove her body away from the town landing. Only an hour before, Jennifer Bennison had telephoned her to ask if she had happened to see her daughter sailing out of the bay. Jennifer said she must have taken her boat out early, while everyone was still asleep.
‘Don’t worry,’ Elizabeth had reassured her pointlessly. But still, she had been unable to settle to any of the tasks that were waiting for her. She had walked into town, telling herself she would collect the plates and dishes she had lent out for the bake stall. And she had been standing outside the town house as the news had run up Main Street like a freak wave.
When she heard that the child had drowned she had to grope for the nearby fence to hold herself upright. Her head turned towards Moon Island, although she couldn’t see even the harbour water from where she was standing. What had Doone seen or done? She was an awkward child with an air of melancholy about her and Elizabeth had not known her well. But now she was possessed by certainty that there was a link between Doone and the old story; one which seemingly renewed itself, generation on generation. Elizabeth’s stomach had churned with a mess of shock and guilt, as though she might have saved Doone if she had tried, as if the drowning was her fault.
Then Leonie Beam had come white-faced towards her. ‘They’ve gone to the house to tell Jennifer and Sam.’
The two women had put their arms around one another, Elizabeth wordlessly grateful that Leonie was there.
‘We should speak to Marty Stiegel again.’ The silence was broken by Marian, of course. She scribbled another line and Elizabeth reached out to her coffee pot, lifted it with an effort and refilled Hannah’s cup. This annual enforced contact was always difficult. Marian was a vulgarian and Hannah a provincial mouse, but a silently critical one, always appearing to judge and find wanting. Yet, Elizabeth reminded herself in her mother’s voice, the job had to be done, whether she enjoyed it or not, because she had undertaken it.
The previous year, Marty had brought along a gas barbecue and had made wild blueberry pancakes for all comers. It had been the success of the stall.
‘I’m sure he’ll help out again,’ Hannah judged.
‘They do have the baby this year.’
‘Marian, it’s only a couple of hours we’re asking for,’ Elizabeth said.
They wouldn’t show their dislike too plainly, any of the three of them. It was muffled about with coffee and china cups and decorous arrangements for the bake stall. Elizabeth looked at Hannah’s pursed mouth and sharp eyes half veiled with pink lids, and thought of the years they had known each other, since they were both young women, all the years that had been pressed into shadowy negative images by no one admitting to their real feelings. Owning to nothing had kept Elizabeth away from Pittsharbor and the beloved bay, and the spellbound heart of the island itself, for the whole of her married life.
Impatience with lists of ingredients and estimations of plates and forks needed, and calculations of charges and change crawled down her spine. It was an imposition to be old and look back on an unfulfilled life. Her memories bore a patina like clouded pewter, without colours or depth. Elizabeth wished she were young again and tasting the luxury of choice, with a passion that made her fingers tremble around the shell of her bone-china cup. And as she gazed downwards she was reproached by the sight of her own hands, age-blotched as they were and roped with sinews.
‘Do you agree, Elizabeth?’
It was Marian demanding and she hadn’t heard the question.
Marian was a bully. Elizabeth felt sorry for her children and their partners, and the grandchildren, driven into acquiescence by an overbearing old woman. Or was it better to be dominating in just the way that Marian was, rather than an accumulation of shadows, a prim negative, like herself? ‘I didn’t hear what you said.’ And she added with a certain satisfaction, ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.’
Marian’s tongue clicked. She repeated the question, which was to do with limiting the order of blueberry pancakes to one per customer because last year the line had wound all around the stall and caused a crowd, and in the thick of it some of the kids had pinched muffins off the dish at the front.
‘I don’t believe it matters a dab,’ Elizabeth sighed at the end of it.
It was a phrase Aaron used. She couldn’t have given a proper reason for why she had come out with it now. Hannah’s expression was inscrutable. Her ankles were set together and her hands rested in her lap; she looked as if she was drawing herself in and away from the other two, and from the polished order of Elizabeth’s drawing-room.
Marian pursed her lips and drew a line in her notebook.
Under her direction they agreed next on who would make pies and who muffins, where the cold-boxes would come from and how many quarts of cream to order, as they did every year. At last the agenda was covered. Marian said, ‘I’ll have Karyn and Leonie help out, and I’ll ask Gail and those Duhane girls if they’ll do some of the marketing and washing up. They’ll like to be part of the day.’
If Hannah and I had ever liked each other, Elizabeth reflected, we could join forces now and set Marian Beam exactly where she belongs. But the years had gone by and even the pain of long ago had been blunted and tempered by time. All that was left was the dilute sparring that took place over coffee and town celebrations, and the triviality of it made a mockery of what had been powerful enough to divide them in the first place.
It was more than fifty years since Elizabeth had last seen the woman on the island. But the memory of her was still sharp in her mind.
Marian was talking unstoppably as the three of them came out on to the seaward side of Elizabeth’s porch. Hannah had announced that since the tide was low she would walk back along the beach and Marian agreed that she would do the same.
Elizabeth escorted her guests through the garden to the head of her beach steps, where they met Marty Stiegel climbing
towards them. There was a little camera slung on a strap around his neck. He gave them his sociable smile and pushed his hair back with two hands, smoothing his temples. ‘I heard there was a summit meeting. I’ve come to offer my services again.’
Elizabeth said, ‘That’s very good of you, Marty. I should have telephoned to tell you we were going to talk about the bake stall this morning.’
‘Marty, you’re a jewel. Are you certain Judith and Justine can spare you for the afternoon?’
‘Sure thing, Marian. It’s good that we summer complaints can give something back to the town.’
Hannah offered him a nod and made to move past at the top of the steps, but he blocked the way with a sun-tanned arm. ‘Let me take a picture, ladies.’ Without waiting for their answer he lifted the camera and snapped off a couple of shots.
Elizabeth could already see the photograph in her mind’s eye. The three of them ranged in a line, Marian’s floridness and Hannah’s unwinking, suspicious gaze, with herself in the middle, caught, so insubstantial as to be almost permeable to light.
‘That’ll be ten bucks,’ Marian laughed. She was waving to grandchildren on the beach. She kissed Marty flirtatiously on the cheek and swung her red skirts down the steps to the shingle.
After Marty had gone there was a moment when Hannah and Elizabeth stood on their own. Elizabeth could have counted almost on one hand the number of times they had been alone in the past fifty years. ‘How is Aaron?’
‘Not as strong as he was,’ Hannah said. ‘But still himself.’ She thanked Elizabeth formally for her hospitality and descended the steps, straight-backed, without putting her hand on the guard rail. Down on the beach she seemed to melt into the background of the bay, like one of the birds she resembled.
The island lay in its skeins of water and rock. If it were not for the boats and holidaymakers in the foreground, the wide view was the same as it had been when Elizabeth was a girl. How have we grown so old, she wondered. How have we grown so that so little matters any more? She turned her back on the beach and the bay, and bent to tear the dead heads off her flowers.
It was a hot day. Corn-weather, as Aaron and Hannah might have called it. The sea was a restless plate of ripples and the beach stones and sand were baked dry by the sun. At the southern end of the beach there were clusters of sunbathers on spread towels, lying between their encampments of picnic baskets, sand toys and rubber inflatables. Children ran into the waves, kicking up arcs of spray. The families from the five houses were out too. John Duhane was walking the low-water line with a panama hat pushed down on his head. Ivy lounged in her bikini, using Lucas’s bent knees as a backrest. Beam children and friends leapt and shouted on either side of a volleyball net, and Judith Stiegel sat reading in a low chair with Justine in a basket beneath a parasol. A shadow fell across Judith’s book and she looked up at Marty. The camera was at his eye again and she grinned into the lens, a lazy, barefaced smile that made him lower it without clicking the shutter. He bent over and kissed her instead, his hand cupping the rounded mass of her naked shoulder. Her skin was warm and slick with sun cream.
‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked him.
‘Visiting the three witches.’
‘Mart. Pancakes?’
‘Hole in one. Justine had her feed? Can I get you something? Otherwise I thought I might play volleyball with the kids for half an hour.’
She nodded her agreement, made complacent by the sun and his deference to her.
Leonie was sitting twenty yards away with Tom at her side. He didn’t often sit on the beach doing nothing, but he had already done his run to Pittsharbor and back, and there wasn’t enough wind for sailing. She watched Marty saunter over to the volleyball and saw Judith settle again to her book. The busy details of the beach, the specks of colour against the sea and sky, and the air’s relentless clarity made her feel as if she were in a Victorian picture. One of the minor English pre-Raphaelites perhaps, painstakingly observed but lacking in emotion. It was not a comfortable feeling. She longed to make something happen, some undisciplined smear of brilliance in the centre of the canvas, and at the same time she dreaded the impulse.
Tom folded the Wall Street Journal vertically into three. Leonie realised her arms were wrapped so tightly around her knees that the muscles of her shoulders were burning. She dropped her hands and kneaded fistfuls of warm dry sand instead. ‘I’ve hardly seen you this vacation,’ she said.
He looked up for a second, not quite audibly sighing. ‘You know how it is in the restaurants. This summer more than ever.’
‘Tom, are you seeing someone else?’ The question came out of nowhere. Once it was spilt it was like a drop of acid, smoking, then burning a hole in the sheet of their tolerance.
‘No.’
She saw that it was the truth. Or at least near enough to the truth to allow his face to blaze with indignation. ‘Are you?’ he countered.
Leonie shook her head. It was the same. Technically innocent, but the smooth surface of honesty was so undermined with the burrowings of despair and dissatisfaction that it must soon collapse.
‘That’s okay, then.’
He was going to turn back to his paper, but she wouldn’t let him. Not now there was a blur right in the middle of the day’s pretty canvas. ‘Do you feel like a walk?’ Leonie suggested.
He considered. ‘I’ll come with you.’
Not I’d like to, she noticed. But doing her a favour.
They skirted the edge of the water, walking with a space of solid air between them. Leonie wondered if John Duhane had turned to watch from under the brim of his panama hat. The dull weight of unhappiness made her hunch her shoulders with self-dislike. There was no reason for this misery, she thought. Or only the old reason that couldn’t be discussed any longer and therefore apparently did not exist. The fact that she couldn’t be happy with all she had was turning her life rancid. And Tom’s, too; the blight was not limited to herself.
They were following the route of the walk she had taken with John. Leonie didn’t want to retrace those comfortable steps in ugly silence. When they had rounded the first headland they came to a narrow inlet lined with rock and pungent with steaming rockweed. At the head was a gritty tongue of sand choked with the grey skeletons of dead trees. She sat down suddenly on the sand. With one hand she gathered some stones and pitched them one by one into the slapping water. Tom hovered behind her for a moment, then sat down a few feet away.
When they had first known each other, their earliest summer together, Tom and Leonie had sometimes taken a walk this way to escape from the rest of the family. Once or twice they had slipped deeper into the spruce wood and found a bed of moss to lie on. They had clung to one another, laughing and whispering like conspirators.
Leonie frowned now, trying to recall exactly how love had felt. A state of greedy inclusion.
She looked sideways at Tom. His face was set in the expression she was too familiar with – unyielding, with the corners of his mouth drawing sharp lines down his cheeks. Sadness and sympathy for him suddenly took hold of her and on an impulse she reached out and put her hand on his arm. He didn’t acknowledge her touch. ‘Do you remember we used to make love in the woods?’ she asked.
‘I remember you saying you felt overheard in our bedroom.’
It was true, but it pricked her that he chose to make it a criticism.
Marian had not put them in Tom’s old childhood bedroom. She had told them that his was too shabby, too cramped to be shared with Leonie, but the new room was also much closer to hers. As if it were as near as she could get to insinuating herself between them.
‘Anyway. It was lovely up here,’ Leonie said lamely, drawing back her hand. She had wanted to be Tom’s wife, but she had ended up in unequal partnership with his mother and his siblings and his businesses.
Tom didn’t answer. He was staring at the sea.
A wave of anger broke and washed over the swell of Leonie’s sympathy. Her husband was mean-spirit
ed and neglectful. If there was guilt it was his, not hers.
So far, she thought with a little shudder of black excitement. So far. ‘What are we going to do?’ She made it clear that she wasn’t asking about tennis versus sailing.
Tom still didn’t look at her. Why? she wanted to shout at him. Just because I can’t grow us a baby, do you have to cut me off altogether?
After a long interval, he answered, ‘Nothing.’
She thought she knew him well, but even so she was shocked by the extent of his withdrawal. Then, just as she had understood over a plate of cherries in Sandy’s Bar that she and Tom didn’t love each other any more, another huge truth dawned on her.
Tom wouldn’t initiate any split between them. He wouldn’t be the cause of it, or even a collaborator. He would not demonise himself in the eyes of his family by dismembering even such a rudimentary and unblessed union as his with Leonie. She would have to be the villain.
The simplicity of it caused her to nod her head, even though her eyes burned.
He wouldn’t even fight properly with her now. They had escaped from the beach to the seclusion of the woods, not for sex any more, but they couldn’t even take the opportunity to yell at each other. A longing for a real war swelled in her throat, a vicious one that would rip their separate protective layers and expose the flesh, after which there could be a truce and maybe a reconciliation. ‘Nothing?’ She began to shout: ‘Jesus, Tom, what are you? It’s like living with some fucking rock formation. Don’t you care what happens to us?’
His face was turned away from her.
Slowly, Leonie wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Speak. Say something.’
He did look at her then. Articulating slowly, pushing out the words between his teeth, he said, ‘You can’t have a baby. You’re not the only woman in the world to suffer it. Grow up, Leonie. Get on with your life.’
‘I don’t think it’s just about babies any more,’ she whispered. Get on with my life. Is that really what he wants?