Moon Island

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘But didn’t she say so?’

  Marty was so close that his breath was warm and moist on her cheek. The comfortable feeling left her, replaced by a tingle of unease. She lifted her head and edged away, and at the same time she heard a floorboard creak overhead.

  ‘No. Quite a lot of what she wrote was in code.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said softly.

  ‘There isn’t any more to tell.’ May folded her arms.

  Marty moved back to the opposite corner of the sofa. He lifted his glass to his mouth, but put it down again without drinking. Upstairs, Justine began to wail. ‘I’ve got to go up,’ he said. His expression had become both eager and submissive in a way that intensified May’s uneasiness. She had a sense that there were fetid adult concerns here, which were at the same time too close to her. The hairs at the nape of her neck prickled, recalling the different sensations Lucas had stirred up.

  Justine’s wail became a louder cry.

  ‘I’m going,’ May assured him. ‘I’ll go the front way, along the lane.’ Marty was barring her way. ‘I’ll be okay. It’s only a couple of steps,’ she promised.

  ‘Does anyone else know about what you found?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t let it upset you, May.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she breathed. Marty was already on his way to Justine. May said good-night and let herself out in the opposite direction from where she had come, through the door that faced towards the Pittsharbor road.

  As she slipped past the Stiegels’ black Lexus she saw through the tangle of hedge that there were lights and people outside the Fennymores’ house. She reached the lane and looked past the tree where Aaron had once surprised her.

  An ambulance was drawn up at the porch steps and paramedics in blue coveralls were lifting a loaded stretcher into the back. Hannah hurried out in her brown coat and climbed in beside it. One of the men secured the doors and took his place in the seat at the front. The engine started up and the headlamps swung over the ragged grass, so May instinctively ducked out of sight behind the hedge. She shrank further when the ambulance had rolled past her. Someone else was coming out of the house, stopping to lock the door and hurrying towards the lane.

  It was Marian. She fled unseeingly past May but May saw her clearly and she was weeping helplessly.

  John was reading in the shadowy room, but he threw his magazine aside as soon as May came in. ‘Where have you been? I was about to come out looking for you.’

  ‘I just went for a walk.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be out for hours?’ He came across to her and tilted her face towards the light.

  May pulled away from him. There had been too much touching tonight and her skin felt bruised by it, although it wasn’t the kind of damage that her father would be able to see. She hid her bitten lip behind her hand. ‘So, where’s Ivy?’

  ‘That’s not the point. Ivy’s adult and you aren’t, not yet. May, why can’t you talk to me?’

  There was accusation in his eyes and pleading, when she didn’t want to see either. She wanted reassurance. If she were still a little girl she wouldn’t have to understand any of the things that had happened to her tonight. But John was failing her. Even though he insisted she was a child he couldn’t make anything right for her and wasn’t that what fathers were supposed to do for their children?

  She had seen him through this window, which now admitted black sky into the room, except for the pane that was blank with cardboard. His arms wound around Leonie Beam and his face different, distorted and remote. Even the thought of it made her feel sick. And it gave her the old crawling sense within her head, in some dark cavity, that there was something connected but even worse. She would do anything, violent or craven, so long as she didn’t have to turn round and see what it was.

  John hadn’t kept Ali safe, had he? How could he shield her either, from anything, when all the time she could read his weakness in his eyes? He wanted things from her, to know that she was all right, when it should be the other way round.

  Dr Metz had told her that it was okay to be angry and it was anger that made her say coldly, ‘I don’t know. Talk about what? I just went for a walk, that’s all.’

  He tried to make her look at him, to hold her eyes, but she slid herself away.

  ‘I saw them taking Mr Fennymore off in an ambulance.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Just a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Poor Mr Fennymore.’

  The telephone began to ring and over the insistent noise May said she was going up to her room. Her foot was on the bottom stair when she heard her father answering. After the first hello his voice changed. It was Leonie, obviously.

  In the bathroom she ran the bath water at full velocity to block out all possible sound and stripped off her clothes. With one foot she nudged the crumpled heap into a corner. Her body felt polluted and ingrained with dirt. When the bath was full to overflowing she reluctantly turned off the taps. There was silence from downstairs.

  She stepped into the hot water and slowly lay down. It crept over her skin until it engulfed her. May let her head sink back until her face swam beneath the surface and her hair fanned out like seaweed. She let out a sigh of bubbles from between her lips.

  Ten

  It would be another hot day, but as yet there was a whitish mist blotting out the sky and sea. The horizon quivered between the two in parallel pale lines of grey and pearl, and the unmoving air was thick with salt. The gulls on the beach stalked and pecked at their wavering reflections in the low-water pools but Leonie stared beyond them at the confines of the bay.

  She saw a lobster boat drawing a diagonal line from the headland to the corner of Moon Island. It slid out of her sight behind the outlying rocks but the pulse of the outboard, more subcutaneous vibration than sound, stayed with her for a long minute afterwards. It was a year ago this morning that she had stood with a brown bag of shopping in her arms, watching Doug Hanscom’s boat bring Doone ashore.

  A jogger down on the beach reached the steps at the southern end and began the climb upwards. It was Tom, on his morning way into Pittsharbor.

  Leonie opened the screen door from the porch, closed it behind her and stood looking into the centre of the house. The wide, shallow stairway with scuffed matting led up from the big hall. On either side two tall, foursquare rooms were filled with white morning light. It was a good house, solid and benign, and untidily comfortable with the well-used and unfussy things that Marian had filled it with. And Leonie was thinking as she walked through the quiet space that she felt about it just as she felt about Marian herself. She could appreciate all the qualities, but she had never been able to make appreciation warm into affection.

  In the kitchen she toasted an English muffin and spread it with cranberry jelly. The sunlight cut through the jelly on the blade of the knife to make it shine like a jewel, and it warmed the yellow Formica of the worktops with their edges eroded like a geological formation to reveal the brown and white strata within. Leonie touched everything gently, the handle of the knife, the ridged knobs of the cupboard doors and the taps over the old sink. In Tom’s absence, in his continued and unbroken absence even though they had slept side by side, she was saying goodbye.

  She sat down at the kitchen table to eat her muffin and watched the sky beyond the windows. The peace didn’t last long.

  Elliot came down the stairs with Ashton in his arms and Sidonie skipping in front of him. ‘You’re up early,’ he said.

  Sidonie squirmed up on to a chair and turned a radiant smile on Leonie. ‘Banana me,’ she wheedled.

  ‘D’you mind, Leonie?’ Elliot asked over his shoulder.

  ‘Of course not.’

  When did I ever mind? I am Aunt Leonie, infertile but obedient.

  As Elliot put the baby into his seat Leonie mashed a banana in a saucer. She put a spoon into Sidonie’s fist, breathing in her early-morning unwashed smell of innocent sleep. Sidonie began to eat
and the intensity of childish concentration moved Leonie as it always did. Out of Elliot’s sight, under the table, she clenched her empty hands.

  Richard was the next to appear, yawning in his bathrobe. ‘Tom gone running?’

  ‘Yes.’ The question was superfluous. When did Tom ever relax his rigid routines?

  The smell of coffee brought Karyn and Shelly downstairs, and two of the younger children who argued about tennis games over their bowls of Cheerios. The noise level rose and Leonie sat within her bubble of isolation and let it break over her. At home in Boston she always ate breakfast alone and in silence. Tom usually stayed in bed longer because he left later for work.

  It seemed inconceivable now that she had ever tried to be one of the Beams, let alone kept on trying for so long. Determination was crystallising inside her. It tasted like elation salted with fear.

  Usually none of the older children appeared until long after breakfast, but this morning Lucas slouched in in his shorts and creased T-shirt. His hair hung down around his face and when he leant over Leonie for the milk he gave off a powerful waft of sweat and stale alcohol. He yawned. ‘Is Grammer all right after last night?’

  Karyn scraped a ribbon of yoghurt from Ashton’s chin. ‘What d’you mean? What happened last night?’

  ‘I thought I was the last one in but Grammer came back a few minutes after me. Mrs Fennymore had called up to ask for some help. The old man was taken ill. They hauled him off to the hospital.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Karyn said. ‘That’s really tough.’

  They heard Marian coming down the stairs and fell silent as they waited for her, all of them looking at the door. She appeared in a tom silk kimono with her hair standing out in a thick mass of grey and silver coils. Her face was marked with creases and there were dark pouches under her eyes.

  Her children made themselves busy around her and even the grandchildren paused for a second in their intake of breakfast. Marian was irritable and rejected the coffee Shelly gave her as too weak. She rebuked Lucas for being only half dressed, before settling at the table in the place she always occupied. She answered their questions about Aaron in a sharp voice.

  He had had severe breathing difficulties, and had become ill and distressed. Hannah had called for an ambulance, then telephoned Marian. ‘She was distressed herself. I went to help, that’s all. There wasn’t much I could do.’

  Leonie watched her. There was a difference in Marian this morning that she couldn’t quite place. The kitchen was too full, there was too much light and noise and talk. Marian drank her coffee and pulled her kimono more securely around her bulk. After she had finished she went to the telephone, but there was no reply from the Fennymores.

  ‘Hannah must be still at the hospital.’

  She brushed aside the questions and went out of the porch door, leaving her children mutely raising eyebrows at each other.

  Leonie dutifully loaded plates and knives into the dishwasher and swept crumbs off the Formica into her cupped hand. Each small action took on significance for being the last time she would do it here. Today she would have to leave. She felt the potential energy spring-loaded inside her, surely just enough of it to carry her away and out of the gravitational field of Pittsharbor. Beyond that, she had no idea.

  She found Marian sitting alone on the cluttered porch. The old wicker chair with a beard of broken cane hanging beneath the seat was her favourite. Marian’s eyes were fixed on the sea and her arms hung heavily over the chair arms, with the dirty diamonds of her rings looking like marine encrustations on the bay rocks. She didn’t hear Leonie approaching, or see her stop and lean against one of the porch pillars with her arms folded.

  Although she had followed her mother-in-law out to the secluded corner, Leonie didn’t know what she wanted to say to her, exactly. It was just that there should be at least some acknowledgement between them of the decline and wastage of her marriage, some honest transaction made and recorded for the future.

  I wanted a baby. I didn’t try on purpose to have this ache and a crater in my belly, did I? Do you think it’s worse for you, or for me, maybe? It wasn’t to Tom she wanted to say this, not any longer, but to his mother who had never loosened her grip on him.

  At length Marian turned her head.

  In the unguarded moment before their eyes connected Leonie saw what it was in Marian that was different this morning and the recognition of it arrested the momentum of bitterness in her.

  Marian was transfigured by grief. It washed the hauteur out of her face and left it loose and vulnerable.

  An uncalculated movement of sympathy started up in Leonie. She found herself kneeling down beside Marian’s chair and taking hold of her meaty hand. She squeezed it tight until the big diamonds of Dickson’s old-fashioned tributes bit into her clenched fingers. ‘Is Aaron dead?’

  ‘No. Not so far as I know.’

  Marian didn’t yield an inch. But Leonie could still imagine why such a chord of sorrow was sounding within her. The Beams and the Fennymores had lived side by side on the bluff for many years. They hadn’t been close friends, or at least Leonie had never detected any signs of particular friendship, but surely Marian would look back on the summers of her own life lived in parallel with Aaron’s and Hannah’s? The probability of Aaron’s death would make her think of Dickson’s and her own. The grief in her face must be for losses Leonie could only guess at.

  It was the place that affected them all. The beach reverberated with sadness. Why did I never recognise it before?

  Sadness was thick like the sea-salt in the air, and as blind and all-pervasive as the endless fogs. The peculiar taint of it clung to the Fennymores and Elizabeth, and it crept through her own tissues like a disease. Now she saw the ravages of it even in the invincible Marian. Under the bright, healthy skin of all their summers, the swimming and sailing and barbecue parties and tennis games, lay the invisible cancer of sadness. The spirit of the place.

  Leonie tried to dispel it, to rub some warmth back into Marian’s hand. ‘Can I do anything?’ she whispered.

  Marian inclined her head. The possibility of a connection stirred between them. Marian felt it too, it was obvious that she did. Leonie thought, Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we can talk to each other. I haven’t tried very hard. I will if she’ll let me. The beginnings of a smile twitched at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

  Marian’s head lifted again and she stared at Leonie. ‘Do anything? No, I don’t think so.’

  The possibility had been there, lying in the no man’s land between them, and she had seen it and chosen not to pick it up. Not only was it too late, the entire night had passed and now the day was coming round again.

  Slowly Leonie let go of her hand. She sat back on her heels with cramp twisting her leg muscles and shook her head as if to clear it after a ringing slap. ‘You never liked me, did you?’

  Sidonie had wandered on to the porch. She stood at the top of the steps looking out over the water in her pink dress and jelly shoes. One fist twisted up the hem of the frock, showing her pants underneath. The jet-black spirals on her forehead lifted a little. A breeze had sprung up off the sea and the tentative white mist would soon be gone.

  Marian had the grace to look startled. ‘You’re Tom’s wife. Of course I like you, Leonie. It goes much deeper than that, you’re family.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Leonie stood up, looking down on the fuzzy grey circle at the crown of Marian’s head, all the sympathy gone out of her. ‘I think you and I disliked each other from the beginning. The shame is that neither of us ever had the guts or the wit to own up to it. If we had done we might have fought about it, or even laughed at ourselves.’

  Richard wandered out with his coffee cup, and Karyn appeared, scooped up Sidonie and ran inside again. ‘What’s happening?’ Richard asked, without much interest.

  ‘Leonie’s upset.’

  ‘I’m not upset,’ she answered. The stored-up energy was suddenly released. It carried he
r along in a seductive rush. ‘In fact, I’m happy. I’m very happy because I’m going to walk out of here right now and I’m never coming back to this place again. I’ve had it with family parties and being an auntie, and a good daughter-in-law. I’m a failure at all of that and at being Tom’s wife as well, although God knows I’ve tried hard enough.’

  Marian’s face contained three perfect circles of shock and amazement, and when she looked at him Leonie saw that Richard’s expression mirrored his mother’s exactly. They were so alike, they were so fucking identical, all the Beams.

  Enough. In her outburst she had sounded just as petulant as Gail or one of the even younger ones. It was time to go, before the Beams or the beach itself finished her off. She half turned in the stunned silence and saw an arrangement of helmet crab and conch shells against the porch rail. She had always hated the beachiness of them, and now she picked up a shell in each hand and hurled them one after another in a curving trajectory towards the edge of the bluff. As if to smash the mirror of the sea. Of course, they fell far short even of the drop down to the beach. They bounced and rolled harmlessly in the seagrass.

  A tide of elation and cathartic fury carried Leonie the few steps to the porch door. She opened it and closed it behind her with elaborate care. In the kitchen there was another silence, with adults and children frozen in their places. They couldn’t have heard from here what had actually happened outside, but the atmospheric shock waves had rippled a warning all through the house.

  Leonie picked up Tom’s car keys from the counter top. Her own car was back in Boston. He always insisted it was pointless to have two cars up at the beach, even though when he went on one of his trips back to the city it left her without independent transport. Her handbag, luckily, was where she had left it yesterday on a chair on top of a pile of magazines. She dropped the keys inside and swung the strap of the bag over her shoulder.