by Rosie Thomas
‘Leonie …’ began Shelly, who was not a Beam and therefore might have been an ally, but still managed not to be.
Leonie didn’t wait to hear her. She went out again into the high hallway and looked up the stairs towards their bedroom, Tom’s bedroom as it had always properly been, thinking about clothes and a suitcase. But then, through the narrow glass panes of the front door, she saw Tom himself coming between the dogwood bushes towards the house. The sight gave her a slight shock, as though she had already placed him somewhere else.
He opened the door, one arm crooked around a bag of croissants and the newspaper.
‘Good run?’ she asked.
She was blocking his way but he side-stepped around her, already moving towards the kitchen. ‘Yes, thanks.’
‘They’re all in there. Everyone’s in the kitchen except Marian and Richard, who are out on the porch.’
He hadn’t even looked at her. But even if he had done, if he had faced her properly and taken account of her it would have been too late. The sweet stream of liberation was running too strongly.
‘Are you going out?’
‘Yes, Tom. I’m going out.’
And with that she left the house. In the sunlight, which had now grown strong, she passed the rusting cage of the tennis court and the bushes that separated the garden from Elizabeth Newton’s. Each successive footstep was lighter and faster. Tom’s elderly Saab was parked nearest to the lane. She slid into the driver’s seat and adjusted the incline and the rear-view mirror to make it hers. As she reversed, then nosed forward into the road, she looked back at the house; the door was firmly closed and no one had come outside to follow her or try to stop her. Leonie realised she was panting for breath as if she had been running.
She drove down the lane, away from Tom and Marian, and the Captain’s House, and the malign curve of the beach with the hungry glitter of sea-water beyond it. She slowed as she passed the Fennymores’, but there was no one to be seen there either.
She took the south-westerly road out of Pittsharbor. When she had put five miles between herself and the beach she relaxed the tension in her braced arms and let her shoulders rest against the seat back. She waited for the undertow of guilt and anxiety, but nothing came. There was only relief.
After another five miles she turned on the radio and searched across the local news and country music stations and weather reports until she came across the voice of Alanis Morissette. Leonie drove on, singing softly, with no idea where she was heading.
The first sign for the upcoming freeway startled her. She had automatically followed the route home – not home any longer, but towards Boston.
She didn’t in the least want to go back there. She braked suddenly and swung in to the side of the road, causing the Ford station-wagon behind her to sweep by in an angry diminuendo of hooting. In the past she might have reddened in belated apology, but now she merely shrugged and wound the wheel in the opposite direction. She took the next turning at random, then another, driving deeper into countryside she had never penetrated before until she had no idea even whether she was headed north or south. The fuel gauge blinked an amber light at her and she frowned back at it, unwilling to have her shapeless reverie broken.
A sign ahead indicated that she was coming to the town of Haselboro. She had never heard of it, and it looked a small, sleepy place as she drove past the neat lawns and white gates of the outlying houses. Although she had eaten the muffin and cranberry jelly for breakfast she realised suddenly that she was ravenously hungry.
Haselboro didn’t have much of a centre. There was a dingy supermarket down a slip road and a garage opposite it across a wider section of the through road. Leonie pulled into the garage forecourt beside the gas pumps and a boy in blue coveralls emerged at once. ‘Fill it up.’ She smiled at him. He had longish hair the same colour as Lucas’s and a face buckled with shyness. Leonie rummaged in her bag and brought out her wallet. There were only fifteen dollars in cash, but she had her credit cards and bank book.
‘Going far?’ the boy asked, not quite looking up from the fuel nozzle.
‘Yes. Well, no. Not really. I’m not quite sure where I am.’
He did squint round at her then. ‘Got a map, have you?’
‘No, actually.’
‘There’s one in there, if you want to have a look. I can’t give it to you, it’s not mine.’ He pointed towards the shop door.
‘Just a glance would be a help.’
The map lay on a counter near the cash till, with a half-eaten hot-dog oozing ketchup into a paper napkin alongside it. Leonie looked longingly at the bitten frankfurter as she flipped the map open. She fumbled the route from Pittsharbor with her forefinger, trying to trace the roads she must have followed in her meander. At length she located Haselboro. To her surprise it was only a couple of miles from the coast. She had driven a sprawling U north-eastwards from Pittsharbor.
The boy materialised at her shoulder.
‘I’m sorry, I interrupted your lunch.’
‘It’s okay.’ He blushed as he busied himself with her credit card.
‘Where can I get one of those?’
‘Huh?’
‘A hot-dog.’
‘Oh, there’s a store down the next street. It’s more of a grocery store, they don’t really sell hot-dogs but I’m sure they’d fix you one if you asked. It’s my mom working there. Say I told you to come by.’
‘Well, thank you, um …’
‘Roger.’
‘Pleased to meet you, Roger.’
‘And you, ma’am.’
Leonie went out again into the sunshine and found that she was smiling.
The store was on a corner at the intersection of two streets. Traffic lights blinked at an empty road each direction and a large yellow dog lay panting in the shade of the store awning. There was a public telephone against the outside wall. Leonie glanced at it and hurried into the store.
A pleasant-looking woman was stacking cans behind a glass-fronted display case. She had the same shyly indirect gaze as Roger. ‘I guess I can,’ she agreed, when Leonie had blurted out her request. ‘It’ll just take a couple of minutes out back.’
While she waited Leonie idly read the local ads on cards pinned beside the door. Laurel Jackson had lost her progressive bifocals, brown steel-rimmed, some time after the first week in August. There was to be a colossal yard sale at Kingdom Road, and a grey and white cat, four white paws, very friendly, had gone missing from home. And under the heading Summer Rental was a snapshot of an uncompromisingly plain grey-boarded box of a cottage, one square window on either side of a tight front door, set in a pretty woodland clearing.
Leonie read the details twice. Suddenly available for short summer rental. One bedroom, fully furnished, $280 per month, plus utilities. No pets, no children, no smokers. There was a name and a telephone number at the foot of the card.
She became aware that Roger’s mother was at her elbow, holding out the hot-dog in a folded paper napkin. ‘Ketchup or mustard?’
Leonie paid, then propped herself against the hood of Tom’s car while she ate, eyed by the yellow dog. The peace and emptiness of Haselboro was soothing. An idea was turning over in her mind and before the last mouthful of frankfurter it had turned into a decision. If not Boston, where she didn’t yet want the company of friends or their inevitable questions, then why not here rather than anywhere else?
It was far enough from the sight and sound of the sea.
In a cottage in the woods she would take a spell of solitude and reflection. Such a place would give her the privacy she needed and the independence, much more than a hotel or a bed and breakfast. There were still almost two weeks of her summer vacation remaining and she could spend that time alone, thinking, and walking and making some plans for the future. At the end of it she would have to go back to Boston, to the job that she now needed more than ever, but maybe, Leonie thought, her mind running ahead, if she kept a cottage she could come back to it when she needed to.
It would be her own place, not permanent enough to be a tie but still somewhere she could depend on. Somewhere that was neither Boston nor Pittsharbor and so free of all the associations that clung to the familiar places.
‘Was that hot-dog good?’
‘Better than good. Mrs … ?’
‘Brownlow.’
‘Mrs Brownlow, I’m looking for a rental cottage. Not for too long, maybe only a couple of weeks while I sort some things out. Do you know if this one is still available?’
She looked doubtful. ‘Jim Whitsey’s place? It’s a ways out of town, I wouldn’t know who’s up there right now. But you could give Jim a call, he’s generally at home in the day since he retired. Phone’s right out there on the front wall.’
Two hours later, after a series of wrong turnings on the woodland roads, Leonie sat in the sun on the cottage step waiting for Jim Whitsey. Goldenrod and magenta spikes of loosestrife grew in the long grass at her feet. There was plenty of light in the clearing and the mixed woodland encircling it danced with shafts of pale green and gold. It seemed welcoming after the forbidding spruce stands of the Pittsharbor shore.
Mr Whitsey bumped up the track in a Chevy pick-up. He shook hands and unlocked the cottage door, stepping aside to let Leonie walk in. He was a man of few words.
There was a woodburner in the main room and the ingrained scent of woodsmoke caught in Leonie’s throat with a reminder of the shadowy room in the Captain’s House. The kitchen was in a corner of the same room, with the bedroom leading off it. The only other room was a tacked-on bathroom at the rear, with an old water-heater and a green-stained bath. A large spider was stranded in the bottom. Leonie opened the window and carefully deposited it outside. ‘I’ll take it.’
‘Two weeks in advance. Cash.’
‘I’ll have to drive back into town to the bank.’
‘Yup.’
But when he secured the door again behind the two of them he extracted the key from the lock and dropped it into Leonie’s hand. ‘You enjoy yourself here. I’ll call by later for the money, if that suits.’
Leonie smiled at him in the sunlight, wondering why she felt so cheerful when she had just turned her back on her whole life. ‘Thanks. I’ll be here.’
After Jim’s pick-up had bumped away she took her seat again on the step. Back into her mind’s eye came the picture of Marian’s crab and conch shells spinning in crooked arcs over the porch rail. Anger had disabled her to the point where she couldn’t even throw straight. Leonie dropped her head into her hands and laughed out loud at the memory.
There was no one on the beach. At the public end were the usual families and groups of kids, but in front of the five houses the glitter of sand and shingle was unbroken.
May paced her way slowly along the tideline. Fragments of twine and polystyrene granules and crustacea shells were caught up with the bladder wrack. The harsh sun burned on her head and drew an unhealthy stink of decaying fish out of the debris at her feet.
The Beams’ porch was empty, not even Sidonie or Ashton was about. Their bright-coloured toys lay scattered around. May looked sidelong, in fear of seeing Lucas, but also willing him to be there.
The breeze had died away and the air was motionless. She shaded her eyes and looked in the opposite direction, out to the island. Its ridge of black trees looked like the spines of some fantastic creature. She thought the whole island might shudder and heave, then dive slowly beneath the water.
A year ago, Doone was already dead.
When she turned to the beach again she saw that Ivy had suddenly appeared. She picked her way over the stones at the base of the beach wall, gold-skinned against the faded green wood of the breakwater. When she reached a patch of sand she spread out her beach towel. Even at this distance May could see the minute crescents of pallor exposed beneath her buttocks as she bent over. Ivy arranged herself on the towel and bent her neat head over a book.
May went on walking aimlessly but all the time her path tended itself towards Ivy. At length she came obliquely to a point within talking distance.
Ivy glared at her. ‘Don’t hang around me. Come over and sit down if that’s what you want.’
May sat down a yard away, looking straight out to sea. Ivy was always so dismissive. May wanted her sister’s attention and she wanted to challenge her too. ‘Where’s Lucas?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Where did you go last night?’
‘Oh, just to the Star Bar with Sam and some of the others. It was okay. Not that thrilling.’
‘Yeah? I went for a long walk with Lucas.’ She had Ivy’s full attention now. She could feel her eyes drilling into the side of her head.
‘So what happened?’
May shrugged hotly. She wanted to lay out the details, to have the scald taken out of them by shared exchange and to be reassured she wasn’t a freak, that it was how it sometimes happened with the right person but so disturbingly in the wrong place at the wrong time. But neither could she resist the chance to taunt Ivy just for once. ‘Oh, uh, you know. He was really nice.’ She sensed but couldn’t see the glare of jealous disbelief and enjoyed it like a sip of iced water cooling her parched throat.
Then Ivy gave her low, disbelieving laugh. ‘Was he? With you and your braces? Well, there’s no accounting for taste.’
May bowed her head. The taunt made her mouth fill with metallic saliva and puffed the flesh of her thighs and belly into hateful cushions within her tight clothes. That was how they did it, of course, Ivy and the handful of thin girls like her whom every boy in every school wanted to date. They promoted themselves with an effortless armoury of ridicule and superiority. Under the claustrophobic skin of the day a flood of hatred pulsed through May and directed itself at Ivy. ‘Why are you such a bitch?’
‘Why are you such a baby?’ Her voice was cool and bored as she turned back to her book.
Effortfully May stood up. The memories of the night before were too vivid and unresolved in her mind. They became a series of jerky tableaux, grotesquely overlit figures superimposed on blackness. How hot the sun felt on her head.
Inside the Captain’s House it was at least cool. With the clockwork force of habit May opened the refrigerator and quickly closed it again. The sight of margarine tubs and dribbled mayonnaise bottles was disgusting.
Upstairs, her bedroom held the sound of the sea within it like a conch shell.
The diary lay in its place next to Hannah’s books. May dusted the tips of her fingers over the black cover.
*
Marian sat in unaccustomed stillness. Making considerate detours around her, Shelly and Karyn prepared lunch once the babies had been put down to nap. The younger generation from Lucas downwards, for once aware of concerns beyond their own immediate circle, had taken themselves off for the day to another beach. The telephone rang once and Marian made a heavy movement towards it, but Tom was too quick for her. It was only a girl calling for Joel.
The adults sat down to eat at the kitchen table. It was most unusual for the food not to be laid out on the shady porch overlooking the sea. A fly buzzed drearily against the screened window, and knives and forks clinked in the silence.
‘Will she have gone back to Boston, do you think?’ Karyn asked.
There was a whitish, pinched area of skin around Tom’s mouth. ‘I’ve no idea where she’s gone.’
‘You must go after her,’ Marian said.
‘I think she’ll come back when she’s ready.’
‘You must go and bring her back.’
Tom put down his knife and fork, neatly positioning them. ‘Leonie is an adult. And so am I. We can make our own decisions.’
There had been so many meals, so many variations on this same rigid theme of family gatherings and advice dispensed. Each of them was used to it, familiar with his or her place in the scheme.
Marian’s lips drew together. ‘I’m not convinced of that, on the evidence.’
Karyn reached out a restraining hand
but her mother shook it off.
‘Do you love her? Do you still love each other? Because if you do you’d be a fool not to go after her right now. This is what matters.’ She made a gesture that took in the circumference of the table and the ring of faces.
‘No.’ The crash of Tom’s chair shook them all. He was on his feet, pushing himself away from the litter of plates and broken bread. ‘No,’ he repeated. He turned from the table and left them staring after him.
Marian’s face collapsed inwards, a network of lines meshing her mouth and eyes. She covered the lower half of it with her hand. ‘What does he know about anything?’ she whispered.
Elizabeth sat in her evening room, where the tendrils of a creeper made a minute scraping against the window glass. The irregular sound competed with the metronome ticking of the clock. Spencer had brought her the news that Aaron had been taken to the hospital. She had telephoned once and had been told that Mr Fennymore was stable. Beyond that there was nothing to do but wait.
When she came back from Europe, with her trunks of new clothes and her albums of photographs of Paris and England, and her taste for French cigarettes, it was Aaron who had been waiting.
The Captain’s House was now owned by some people from Bangor, Elizabeth’s mother had told her that in one of the regular letters from home, so there could be no more meeting in the empty dust-barred rooms where feathers waltzed in the breeze of their passing. Instead there had been a chance encounter on Main Street on an afternoon when summer had faded into the smoky chill of late September. Elizabeth had already been back in Boston for almost a month; there had been some parties she had wanted to go to, so she had not made the journey up to Pittsharbor right away. At one of the parties, the engagement celebration of a girl she had been at school with, she had been introduced to a lawyer called Andrew Newton. He was almost thirty, more than ten years older than Elizabeth herself. But she had liked his dry sense of humour and his slightly formal manners because they reminded her of some of the Englishmen she had met on her travels.
‘Newton? Newton?’ Grandfather Freshett had mused. ‘Randwyck Newton’s boy?’