by Rosie Thomas
Marian was presiding at the stall. The church green was already thronged with people although it wasn’t quite noon and the Reverend Leavitt hadn’t declared the fair officially open. There were families with young children and weighty, meandering older couples, most of them wearing bermudas and peaked caps against the bright sunshine. It was one of Pittsharbor’s rare, truly hot days when even the breeze off the sea was stilled. Most of the younger visitors and townspeople were missing. There was a softball tournament starting up and a three-mile fun run was under way from Deer Hill to the finish point at the harbour car-park.
But May was there.
She hung in Marian Beam’s shadow, watching without seeing as Marian briskly laid out the baked goods.
‘You sure you know the price of everything, May?’ A tray of moist, glazed blueberry pies from Hannah’s kitchen took centre place. ‘There’s a list here, see, so you can always check.’ Marian rattled a canister with a secure lid. ‘And you give change from here, we’ll be needing a heap of quarters since Elizabeth insisted on pricing the pies at two seventy-five. Good, here’s Marty at last.’
Marty and Lucas unloaded the gas barbecue from a borrowed pick-up and hauled it into position under Marian’s directions. Unable even to look at Lucas, May stared dully at the grass. It was pocked with dusty hollows and coarsened with weeds.
‘Hi.’ His bare feet were planted in front of her. There were tiny tufts of bleached hairs glinting on each of his toes.
The diary. With the whaling book in her hand the sets of numbers had slowly but obediently yielded their meaning. 66 7 10, He. 146 12 2, touched. 67 10 9, me.
Doone’s words about Lucas crept in May’s bloodstream – or not the words themselves because they were so bare – but the thick, impassioned, glutinous intensity that was locked into the unravelled code.
Those coded parts of the diary were the most disturbing, yes, the hottest thing May had ever read. Once she had painstakingly picked them out she couldn’t get them out of her head. ‘Oh. Hi.’
‘How’s the hand?’
The knuckles were criss-crossed with surgical tape, but the shallow cuts were already healing. An accident, John had told everyone, even Ivy. May had tripped and stuck out a hand to save herself. Do you want to talk about what’s happening? her father had asked her. May had answered flatly, No.
‘Uh, it’s okay.’
May felt rather than saw Lucas shrug and stroll away, and all the time Doone’s obsession made her skin shiver as if she had a fever.
He touched me. I knew he wanted to. All the time he wants to, but his hands move nearby in the air instead. But today, after we swam in the sea, he gave me my towel.
‘Towel’ was one of those words written plain, because Doone couldn’t find it in the whale book.
Nobody was there. He dried me and lifted a coil of my hair between his fingers. Touched my shoulder with his finger, his eyes shut. Both of us shaking.
The very clumsiness of the available words, the make-do of the language, stirred a response in May. She closed her eyes and the scene made itself vivid. She saw Lucas bending his head, intent on drying the beads of salt water from Doone’s pale shoulders and the precise articulation of his finger joints as he played with the sticky curl of her hair. It wasn’t the same Lucas who fooled on the beach with the rest of the Beams, nor even the version of him who fondled and necked with Ivy. She never even named him in the scribbled pages but he was Doone’s alone, violently painted and coloured out of nothing with words that sometimes didn’t even fit together. And mine, May thought. Mine, too, because of her.
She opened her eyes, realising that she had been hugging herself so tightly that her fingernails had dug into her upper arms.
Marty Stiegel was looking at her. ‘You okay?’
There were already people standing in line for blueberry pancakes. A little girl held a balloon and her brother tried to grab it from her.
May nodded her head. ‘Yes.’
The blur of burning gas wavered and fined down into little blue points as Marty fiddled with the controls. ‘Right. We got customers, so let’s make pancakes. You want to take the orders and set out plates for me?’
‘Okay. Whatever you want.’
Marian was loudly giving instructions too, from behind the pies and muffins. It was very hot next to the barbecue and the crowd pressed all round them. Tom Beam was there and Elizabeth Newton in one of her ladylike dresses. May saw Leonie’s pale face swim out of the sea of all the rest and turned sideways so that her shoulder partly blocked the unwelcome view. She hadn’t seen her for two days, since the night of the broken glass. Lucas had gone, to play softball or to hang out with Ivy at the beach. She rubbed her forehead with her fist and tried to concentrate on what Marty was telling her to do.
Leonie thought May looked ill. It didn’t escape her notice that the girl wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Marian was rattling the tin of quarters to attract her attention and Tom moved to make room for his wife behind the makeshift counter. Leonie took her place obediently, with the heat of rebellion invisible inside her. She was thinking that nothing tied her here, to Tom or her mother-in-law or the Pittsharbor Day bake stall, and she had been wrong to bend her head to their demands for so long. If Tom and I loved each other, she thought. If we did, then Marian’s intransigence would be funny, and I would be able to bear the closeness of my baby nieces and nephews, and Pittsharbor would be as precious to me as it is to them. But we don’t love each other.
Instead of sounding a knell, the truth began to offer her some hope of escape.
Elizabeth worked from the other end of the stall. She didn’t recognise many of her customers for cookies and muffins. There were few local people in the line, or anywhere on the church green. At the height of summer Pittsharbor belonged to the visitors and she saw no harm in that. Tourists brought prosperity to a coastline that had once been frozen with poverty; she was a summer migrant herself, just like the Beams and the others, although Marian considered herself above the rental tide that flooded the coast every year. It was a shame Aaron and Hannah were so resistant to Spencer’s proposition. The land was ripe for development.
Characteristically, Marty was a blur of energy. He juggled his two pans, flipping an unending series of pancakes out on to the paper plates May held for him. He even found time for good-humoured conversation. ‘I got a great shot of you.’
‘What?’ Her sore hand wobbled and she almost dropped a loaded plate before thrusting it into the outstretched hands of a waiting customer. ‘Three dollars, please.’
‘Down at the beach. When you were playing volleyball with the other kids. I’ll show you tonight, if you want to come over before the party.’
‘Party?’
‘After the town fireworks. Just beer and barbecue, for the five houses and whatever kids are around. Maybe not the Fennymores. Are you and your dad and sister coming?’
May moistened her lips. ‘I … I guess so. Although, I don’t know.’ A party for the bluff houses meant Leonie as well as Lucas. Darts of confusion shot through her. A hand clutching loose change opened under her nose. ‘Miss? You gave me a dollar short.’
Marty had already turned back to his pancakes.
The afternoon grew hotter. The sky was a thunderous metallic blue and the sea seemed exhausted into stillness. The crowds that had thronged the green over lunch-time thinned out as people drifted down to the harbour and the beach. Karyn and Elliot arrived to relieve Marian, who swept the babies away to buy balloons. Tom took over the pancake-making and when Marty left, May seized the opportunity to slip away too. A little later Richard and Shelly arrived with their children and suddenly there were more helpers than customers.
Leonie stood by her husband’s shoulder. ‘Is there something I can do?’
He flipped yet another pancake on to a paper plate and heaped it with sweet blueberries before folding and anointing it with sugar and cream. A woman who should have refused the temptation accepted
the plate and dug a plastic spoon into the ooze. ‘Nope. Thanks.’
Leonie knew well enough what Tom thought of her cooking, but the curtness of his dismissal made her head jerk up and her mouth fill with a retort. Before she uttered it she looked along the efficient line of Beams working the bake stall and turned away abruptly.
The churchyard was enclosed by a tidy white picket fence and a gate that led on to the green. Leonie clicked open the gate and stepped inside. Immediately the air felt cooler from the prospect of shade under the trees edging the plot. She put her hands in the pockets of her shorts and wandered along the path between the gravestones. Most of the inscriptions were familiar to her, but she let her eyes travel once more over the memorials to Purrits and Hanscoms and Deeveys.
What to do? she asked herself hotly and incoherently. What to do for the best?
In the farthest corner stood an old yew tree. When she reached it Leonie stopped in its green-black shelter, stroking the ribbed, fibrous bark with her fingertips.
To go or to stay. Those were her choices, without making John Duhane a factor in either of them. The other night after May had gone up to her bedroom they had sat together for a little while, mostly in silence. Then John had stood up and said he would see her back to the Beams’ house. They had flitted through the Japanese garden and descended the beach steps. Their footsteps mushed noisily on the shingle and the waves sucked at the tideline.
At the Beams’ stairs John had stepped back, almost melting into the darkness. ‘Good-night,’ he’d said quietly.
An hour before, they had been locked in one another, then May’s staring face had materialised at the window and the glass had shattered under her fist.
‘Good-night,’ Leonie had answered formally, as if they were strangers.
Since then they had only glimpsed each other in the distance.
‘I always find it a good place for thinking.’ The voice made Leonie spin round, a startled gasp catching in her throat. Elizabeth was kneeling beside one of the graves. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’ She motioned towards the headstone. ‘I took the opportunity to come and do some tidying up. Have they finished with you at the bake stall too?’
Leonie moved out into the harsh sunlight and stood at Elizabeth’s side. The plot was well tended and there were fresh garden flowers in a marble um. Screwing up her eyes against the brightness, she read the inscriptions and saw that it was the grave of Elizabeth’s parents. ‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ she murmured, but Elizabeth stood up and brushed at her skirt.
She dropped a pair of secateurs and a trowel into her raffia basket. ‘I’m done here. Perhaps we could sit over there for five minutes.’ There was a bench against the fence, still in the tree’s shade. A patch of scuffed earth in front of it and the scattering of cigarette butts suggested that it was one of the evening hang-outs of the town youth.
When they sat down Leonie groped in her pocket and brought out a pack of her own cigarettes. She had started smoking again in the last few days, ignoring Tom’s disapproval. She lit up and exhaled fiercely. She was calculating that she must have known Elizabeth Newton for all the years she had been coming to the beach, but she couldn’t remember ever exchanging more than polite commonplaces with her.
‘My mother and father are here. But my husband is at St John’s in Boston. Where should I be put when the time comes, I wonder?’ Elizabeth spoke meditatively, as if to herself. ‘In the end it will be Spencer who decides.’
‘Won’t he do what you tell him to?’
‘I suppose he might.’
Leonie suddenly laughed. There was a sly humour in Elizabeth she had never noticed before.
‘What I would really like’, Elizabeth continued, ‘is to be planted out on Moon Island, like Sarah. Now, that is a beautiful spot.’
‘On the island? Sarah who?’
Elizabeth slowly turned her head. She examined Leonie’s face in detail, searching for a sign. ‘It’s an old story. Haven’t you ever heard it?’
The Pittsharbor Day noise from the green was a long way off as Leonie listened. But threading in and out of Elizabeth’s low murmur she thought she could hear the counterpoint of Tom’s voice and Marian calling, and the clamour of children. She frowned in concentration, following Elizabeth’s narrative. The old woman was a good story-teller.
‘Little May Duhane saw her ghost.’
Leonie straightened her back. The gravestones marched away from her across the grass, their shadows beginning to lengthen now. An uncomfortable association that she couldn’t place scratched at her subconscious. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she said. ‘Or in supernatural warnings, whatever they might be. But I’m sure of one thing. May will be all right in the end, however difficult her life may be now. Her father loves her and he puts his children first, above everything else.’ She paused, looking down at her hands resting in her lap. She twisted the wedding ring on her finger and stared away again over the gap-teeth of the gravestones. ‘It’s her age. The demons of adolescence. They’ll let her go in the end. Don’t you remember what it was like to be that age?’
‘Yes, I remember.’
The tremor in the older woman’s voice made Leonie turn to look at her. ‘I didn’t mean to dismiss the Sarah story.’
‘You didn’t dismiss it. You just said you didn’t believe in one aspect of it.’
Leonie sighed. She gestured away to the green, where the buying and selling was beginning to wind down. Lucas Beam was reversing a pick-up truck too fast towards the grass. ‘Pittsharbor’s a mundane place. We spend muddled, ordinary times in it.’
‘Do you wish for something more than that?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Are you in love with him?’
The question was so unlooked-for that Leonie found herself answering without calculation. ‘Perhaps. Or I could be if I let it happen, which I won’t.’
Of course Spencer had passed on what he had seen in the car-park that day. How is it, Leonie wondered, that there are any secrets at all in a place as small as this?
‘It’s none of my business, I’m sorry.’
‘You’re right.’
But Elizabeth was not deflected by the finality in Leonie’s voice. ‘Forgive an old woman’s intrusion. At my age there isn’t much to do but observe other people’s lives and make presumptuous conclusions about how they should handle them. You aren’t very happy, are you?’
There was no point in attempting a denial. The children were much closer now, running past the fence that separated the graveyard from the green and Leonie tilted her head to watch them as Elizabeth talked.
‘Don’t pass up the chance of happiness, if you think it might be within your reach. When it’s gone you will never stop regretting its loss.’
‘It sounds as though you speak from experience.’
‘I do,’ Elizabeth said. Leonie waited with interest and the beginnings of sympathy, but the older woman didn’t say any more. Instead she added, ‘I saw the ghost too, when I was not much older than May. I asked who she was and my grandmother told me the story.’ Elizabeth’s hands opened as they lay in her lap. Her wedding and engagement rings were worn to thin gold hoops and they were loose on her finger. ‘It’s like a duty, a piece and a part of belonging to the beach, to hand on the history. Keeping the thread running.’
‘To hand it on to May and me? I don’t feel that I belong here. The opposite, in fact. I wouldn’t know about May.’
‘You remind me of each other. You’re alike.’
The incongruity of the idea made Leonie hesitate, then suddenly she thought, yes. Maybe we are. Maybe that’s why we mistrust each other. ‘And you too,’ she said with conviction. The idea comforted her. ‘What do you think I should do, Elizabeth?’ Using her name was a token of friendship.
‘I can’t tell you what to do. All I know is that I didn’t take a chance, a gamble, a long time ago. I was sorry for it afterwards.’
‘I see. Thank you,’ Leonie sa
id.
Ivy and Lucas were with a crowd of young people at the Seafood Shack down on the harbour. Lucas had been playing softball all afternoon and Ivy was angry with him for neglecting her. She sat sideways at the table where Lucas was eating a double crab roll, with one smooth thigh touching the leg of Sam Deevey’s jeans. Sam was one of the locals and a bit of a hick, she thought, but not at all bad-looking in an Antonio Banderas kind of way.
‘You coming down to the beach tonight?’ Lucas asked her, his mouth full of crab and mayo.
Ivy barely turned her head. ‘I’m going to watch the fireworks with Sam. Maybe afterwards.’
‘Sure,’ Lucas said uncertainly. He wasn’t used to rejection, even by someone as gorgeous as Ivy. The evening in prospect was uninviting without her.
May waded out of the sea and shook the drops off her hair and skin like a dog. It had been so hot that for once the cold shock of the water was welcome and she was glad there was no one about to see her in her swimsuit. She stood with her back to the houses and the deserted beach, rubbing her chin with the corner of her towel. The sea was flat and milky pale, reflecting the mild early-evening sky. The island’s hunched back bristled against the colourless horizon. Then she heard confident footsteps treading the shingle behind her.
‘Hi,’ Marty called to her in his friendly way. Judith and he were younger than most of the other beach adults and he liked to make his social moves between the generations of parents and teenagers, seeming to belong with equal ease to both groups. ‘Are you all on your own? Want to come up and have a Coke or something with Judith and me?’
‘Okay,’ May said. She pulled a wrap over herself.
There was baby stuff spread all over the Stiegels’ floor and Judith sitting in the middle of it with Justine on a diaper across her broad knees. May loitered awkwardly, wishing she hadn’t come, while Marty fetched drinks for them.
‘Are you having a good time up here?’ Judith asked. She was so big, with her solid shoulders and upper arms rounded like boulders on the beach.
May knew she was a sculptor and thought she looked a bit like a sculpture herself. One of those massive, immovable pieces of work that sit on lawns outside public buildings. ‘Yes, thank you.’