by Rosie Thomas
There was a first-aid box in one of the cupboards. She fetched it, checked the lacerations for splinters of glass and swathed May’s hand in bandages. May sat silent, uncomplaining. At the same time John swept up the broken glass and wrapped the jagged fragments in newspaper. He found a piece of a cardboard carton and cut it to fit over the hole in the window, then taped it securely in place.
At last May sat nursing her bandaged fist in her lap. Leonie made a cup of tea and gave it to her, and the child obediently drank it. Then she put the empty cup aside and stared through the window with its disfiguring patch of card at the velvety sky beyond. There was a bruised quiet.
John sat down on the chesterfield at May’s side. ‘Do you think we should talk about this? About what you saw happening between Leonie and me?’
May turned her head stiffly. She darted a look at Leonie, not her father. ‘Not now. I don’t want to.’
‘Why did you try to hurt yourself?’
‘I don’t know. I just did it.’
Leonie sensed that it was the truth. Also that there were too many other things that May did not know or understand.
‘You won’t do it again,’ John said.
‘No,’ May answered quietly. After a moment she added, ‘I think I’ll go upstairs now.’
They waited until they heard the door of her bedroom close and the faint creak of footsteps subside overhead.
John dropped his head into his hands. ‘Jesus.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry she had to see what she did. But doesn’t she have to learn to accept sooner or later that there’s a world beyond her immediate wishes and concerns?’
‘Yes. But I don’t know how that happens.’
They sat in silence after that, occupied with their separate fears.
May felt calm, as if breaking the glass and shattering the image behind it had been a catharsis. She walked the thirteen steps across her room and back again, then touched the tips of her fingers to the door, checking that it was firmly closed. She turned again and saw the three books innocently lying in their place on the shelf.
Without thinking she picked one up and awkwardly flipped the pages with her bandaged hand. It was the whaling book and she looked with indifference at the heavy old-fashioned type until she noticed some pages near the end that were marked with pencil. Words were faintly underlined, not consecutive words, nor did they make any sense when she read them in order, but still some faint association nagged in her mind. She frowned at the brown-edged pages, then at the pencil marks themselves because they seemed to contain some familiarity that maddeningly swam just beneath the surface of her consciousness. She riffled through the pages in the opposite direction and found nothing. She was about to discard the book again when frustration made the connection for her.
She had flipped the pages of Doone’s diary in this way and felt just the same baffled impatience with a secret she couldn’t unlock. The skin at the back of May’s neck suddenly prickled with cold.
She placed the whaling book open and face up on the top shelf, and picked up the red-and-black diary. Some of Doone’s last entries, the coded ones scribbled with such heat that the groups of numbers were gouged into the underlying pages, were written in pencil. The same soft, blunt pencil.
May stared at the trios and pairs of numbers. She realised that her mouth was open and her breath snicked audibly in her chest. Eagerness fought with an impulse to throw the books aside and never look at them again. With exaggerated care she smoothed both sets of pages, glancing from one to the other.
Then she remembered the birthday present. It had been a gift from an English relative of Alison’s when Ivy turned thirteen. The great-aunt hadn’t seen Ivy or May for a long time and the present was much too young for Ivy, whose interests had long ago switched from toys to nail polish and sleep-over pyjamas. May had inherited the book. She remembered the laminated white board covers and bold tide lettering quite clearly. It was Great Games, Puzzles and Quizzes for Kids. One of the pages was headed ‘Secrets to Share: a simple book code’.
May licked her dry lips. That was what it was, of course, Doone’s secret code. Simple, once you knew which book she had chosen. The trios of numbers were page, line and word. Where there were only pairs of numbers she had found the word she wanted on the same page.
May chose a group of numbers at random. Her bandaged fingers and the way her hand shook made it hard to turn the pages of the Dolphin book. The first set of three numbers – page, line and word, she murmured to herself as she laboriously counted them off – yielded I. The second gave her followed and the third, which she knew would be proof that her guess was right, was him.
I followed him.
Breathlessly she took the next chunk of numbers and slowly counted out their placings too. She was staring at it so intently that the book’s sullen typeface began to blur in front of her eyes. It took her several minutes to decode Doone’s words but at last she had He turned around and saw me.
She glanced up briefly at the bare room. There was the rug covering the burn mark in the haircord carpet, the faint outlines on the walls where Doone’s posters had been taped, the French bed.
Now, May thought. Now I’ll know.
Eight
By nine o’clock in the morning on Pittsharbor Day preparations in Main Street and on the green beside the church were in full swing. Flags and bunting strung between the Wigwam craft gallery and Sandy’s Restaurant stirred in a gentle breeze off the sea. Main Street was closed to traffic for the day and storekeepers were laying out displays of goods on the sidewalk in front of their windows. The Wigwam’s owner made a pyramid of Native American baskets and arranged an armful of dried flowers on the top.
‘Going to be a good one,’ Alton Purrit remarked to Edie Clark in the Sunday Street Bakery.
‘I don’t know as it makes much odds,’ Edie said with a touch of sourness. The home-bake stalls on the green took away more business than the day’s extra visitors ever brought in.
‘Well, there’s no harm in getting the town talked about by the rest of the county,’ Alton chuckled. The Jenny Any would be full all day long taking visitors on twelve-dollar trips around the bay and islands.
‘Talk never cost anything, of course.’ Edie had to have the last word. She bundled his bread into a brown bag and folded the mouth with a sharp crease before handing it over. When Alton took it without a word she was afraid she might have been unfriendly and to make amends she nodded towards two people passing beyond the bakery window. ‘Nice to see Aaron out and about.’
He was leaning heavily on Hannah’s arm. They shuffled slowly down the sidewalk towards Main Street and the harbour.
‘Mhm. He don’t look too bright, though,’ Alton said. ‘Morning, Edie.’ He tucked his bag inside his year-round windbreaker and headed out into the street.
Aaron stopped for breath on the corner of Sunday and Main. Glancing at his face, Hannah steered him to a bench in the shade in front of Howard’s Hardware. They sat in silence for a minute between two pyramids of saucepans and shiny galvanised buckets, while Aaron sucked the mild air into his lungs. ‘Just look at it,’ he rasped, when he could speak again.
Hannah surveyed the flags and flowers and tables of goods for sale. ‘It’s only a day, what harm can it do? The visitors like it and so do the children.’
When she turned her head again she was pained to see that the seams in Aaron’s cheeks were glistening with tears. She knew him perfectly, from so many years of watching and accepting his ways. It wasn’t just the catchpenny street decorations, or the traders’ determination to do as much selling as possible in the invented name of Pittsharbor Day that had made him weep. They were only the outward signs of changes he could do nothing to prevent. Aaron was crying for a time and a place that he had lost, and for chances that would never offer themselves to him again.
Hannah understood too that he would despise his own grieving, because he would interpret it as weakness. She incli
ned her head so as to seem not to notice his tears. Her knee-bones stood out tiny and sharp under the folds of her skirt. Then she took Aaron’s arm through hers. The back of his hand when she touched it felt as brittle as a dead leaf. ‘Have you got your puffer?’ she asked.
Aaron used an inhaler to help his exhausted lungs. ‘Not using it out here,’ he reprimanded her. There was a blue tinge to the skin around his lips and the rest of his face was stone grey.
A pair of dead leaves was exactly what they were, Hannah thought, still clinging to the branch while the fat spring buds pushed out all around them. Pittsharbor was putting out new foliage in gaudy colours and they hung on at the tip of their twig, waiting for the brutal wind to dispatch them. How cruel old age turns out to be, she reflected, and a twist of sympathy for Aaron that was all wound up with love and exasperation pulled at her heart. She felt a distaste suddenly equalling his for the new Pittsharbor with its gaudy decorations and artistic shops and hand-painted signs set out to catch the summer visitors’ jaded attention.
The town that she and Aaron had grown up in had been a harsh but logical place. It was governed by the winter ice and short summer’s heat, and by fishing and making do against the weather, and the other plain rules of survival. It had been the same way since the first houses were built around the harbour. There had been no pizza and subs, or quilt shops lining Main Street, or summer visitors in their rental cottages. Except for the Freshetts to begin with and the other families who had followed them out to the bluff. It didn’t occur to Hannah that she might also let herself grieve for a way of life that was finished. She sat and held on to Aaron’s arm instead, gazing expressionlessly ahead of her.
A red jeep swung down Sunday Street and braked noisily in front of the bakery. A young man in bermudas and sneakers leapt out and ran into the store, leaving music tinnily thumping from the jeep’s speakers. Hannah knew him by sight. He came every year to stay at one of the cottages in the woods behind the bluff. The land had once belonged to Aaron, from a parcel he had bought for next to nothing right after the war. In time he had sold it again, using the money from the sale to extend and weatherproof the house where he and Hannah now lived. Over the years a series of boxy houses had been put up in clearings in the woods and the occupants’ name-boards lined the access track that had once led only to a loggers’ clearing. The young man sprinted out again and tossed a brown bag into the passenger seat. He reversed up to the top of the road and accelerated away.
As the din faded Hannah was thinking about Elizabeth Newton. If she had come home from Europe and agreed to marry Aaron, against the Freshetts’ wishes, would he be a happier man now? It seemed cruellest of all that there was no way of telling. The different paths their lives might have taken were as conclusively lost as the old Pittsharbor their possibilities had once inhabited.
‘I’m ready to walk back now,’ Aaron said.
Hannah had left the station-wagon at the other end of Sunday Street, not far from the church. Aaron had insisted that he wanted to walk down the town first thing to see what inanities were going on and that, of course, was what they had done.
They stood up and moved to where the sharp sun sliced across the sidewalk. With the warmth of it on his back Aaron put Hannah’s arm aside. They walked slowly past Edie Clark’s windows. ‘Leave them all to it,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ Hannah agreed.
Spencer saw the station-wagon with Aaron and Hannah inside as it turned into the Fennymores’ entry from the road behind the five houses. He murmured to Alexander, ‘I’ll call on him now. I guess it’s as good a time as any.’
He waited for a few minutes, then sauntered after the car. Hannah was coming down the steps from the porch. ‘Good-morning, Mrs Fennymore. How are you?’
Spencer Newton had impeccable, slightly old-fashioned manners that went with his preppy clothes and air of unshakeable superiority. Spencer would never be rude, or even abrupt. Like his mother he made Hannah feel wrong-footed from the moment he opened his mouth, but she held her ground on the bottom step. ‘Thank you, Spencer. What can I do for you this morning?’
‘Is Aaron at home?’
‘He’s resting. Can I help you?’
Spencer put his head on one side and smiled. ‘I was hoping to discuss our proposition.’
‘No.’
The smile only broadened. ‘Mrs Fennymore, you can see the sense of it, surely? If Mr Fennymore agrees to sell the land to me it will give him – and you – a healthy capital sum that you can invest against medical expenses, nursing requirements, whatever you both may need in the future.’
Hannah said nothing, only watched him with her round bird’s eyes.
‘You both know me well. I belong to Pittsharbor and I love the beach as much as you do.’ When Hannah made no response he corrected himself, ‘Or almost as much. I wouldn’t do anything or sanction any development over there that was in any way unsuitable or intrusive. I’d like to build a small house for myself, one or at the most two others, well screened, to cover my own outlay…’ Spencer couldn’t help glancing at the coveted ground as he spoke. It was the tongue of headland that backed the southern end of Moon Island Beach, from the side of the Fennymores’ property to the curve of the bluff road as it wound towards Pittsharbor. It was prime seafront land, ripe for development. Aaron had acquired it from old man Swayne forty years ago.
‘No,’ Hannah repeated.
Spencer had been wheedling and cajoling about the land for a long time. He had tried a dozen different tacks and none of them had brought him any closer. But Aaron was tired now and his grip was loosening. ‘Why not, Mrs Fennymore? It’s just a piece of ground. It sits there. It could be utilised, put to work for you …’
‘No.’
Hannah was surprised at herself. Elizabeth was a part of all this, of course. The woman was probably lending her son the money for the deal. If she and Aaron gave way to what the Newtons wanted, a pincer movement would cut them off from the town and the space of the beach and the sea. There would be little grey shingled boxes and hammocks and barbecues under the trees, and their nearest neighbour on the town side would no longer be the shack that had turned into the Flying Fish.
The new Pittsharbor Aaron had seen this morning was swallowing up the old one and the greedy mouth of it was right here, mumbling against their own fences. Hannah saw it as only part of history’s pattern that the offensive should come in the shape of Elizabeth and her son, because Elizabeth had always been there like a shadow. For all her married life Hannah had soothed and protected and defended Aaron, but she had never succeeded in blotting out the past.
She threw up her hands and pressed the flat palms against Spencer’s crisp shirt-front. If all she had ever been able to do was defend her husband, then she wouldn’t give up the meagre role now. Her amazing strength propelled Spencer backwards, away from the house. He stumbled over his own polished loafers and his mouth gaped in an instant’s disbelief. ‘Go away. Go away right now, and don’t ever come back here.’
Spencer took two more steps backwards and raised his hands in a gesture of submission. ‘Yes. Of course not. I’m sorry you misunderstood me, I didn’t…’
‘It’s not a misunderstanding. I’ll say it again. Aaron won’t sell our land to you so’s you and your mother can build condos or whatever it is you’ve got planned. He may be ill but he won’t weaken and even if he does you still have me to contend with.’
The declaration gave Hannah a novel thrill of power. She squared her shoulders and watched Spencer continue his retreat, until he had skirted May’s tree and disappeared into the lane again.
When she turned round she saw that Aaron had come out on to the porch. He was leaning against one of the supports, steadying himself with one hand. He looked ill and very old. Hannah went to him at once.
‘What did he want?’
‘Nothing. Just giving me a message from Elizabeth about the bake stall.’
Alexander was sitting out on the deck
reading Scott Turow. The glittering bay and the island were a perfect backdrop. He put his bookmark carefully in place when he saw Spencer. ‘What happened?’
Spencer shrugged. ‘Still a blank. But there’s plenty of time.’
‘Ah. Elizabeth was out here looking for you five minutes ago.’
‘Thanks. I’ll go and see what she wants.’
The house was cool with blinds drawn against the sun. The scent of baking led him to the kitchen where Elizabeth was setting out trays of blueberry muffins. She was wearing an apron over one of her old-fashioned afternoon dresses and a complex of associations made Spencer suddenly feel a child again. He stole a muffin from a corner of one of the trays and bit into it as his mother turned and asked him, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Hannah and Aaron Fennymore still being obstructive about the sale.’ He made a wry, appealing face.
The instant’s unpeeling of the years affected Elizabeth too. She put down her oven glove and hugged Spencer as if he were a little boy again. They almost never touched each other nowadays and broke apart quickly, without speaking. ‘I wanted you to drive me and the muffins up to the green, so I won’t have to search for somewhere to park.’
‘Of course I will.’
‘Marian’s already gone, so we’ll have to be quick. I saw Leonie driving her.’
Spencer helped her out of her apron and folded it over a kitchen chair. ‘Leonie?’ he murmured, remembering something. ‘What’s going on there, I wonder?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Guess what I saw?’ He described the brief scene in the car-park. Spencer had an eye for telling details.
But instead of responding to the titbit of gossip Elizabeth only hesitated, frowning. ‘Poor child,’ she sighed in the end.
‘Child? If Leonie Beam’s not a grown woman I’m Bette Midler.’
‘I meant the daughter. John Duhane’s younger one.’
Spencer had barely noticed May’s existence. ‘Why would it be a problem for her? Didn’t you say Duhane’s wife was dead?’