by Rosie Thomas
When Ivy had gone the house settled around May into shadow and silence.
Eleven
There was not much Leonie could do to make the cottage living-room look welcoming. The chairs on either side of a brown shagpile rug were mismatched and hollow-seated, and the dim overhead bulb was dimmed still further by being encased in a cylindrical green shade. She put the jug of wine in the refrigerator, which looked as if it had stood in the same spot on the dented kitchen tiles for the past thirty years. She was humming as she went out into the dusk and picked some spikes of goldenrod from the clump beside the cottage door and arranged the flowers in a chipped earthenware jug from one of the cupboards. A pair of thick, velvety moths swirled through the open door and began a competitive dance around the lampshade. The silence of the woodland clearing and the damp pungency of the evening air soothed Leonie’s spirit.
It was after nine o’clock when she heard the car coming up the track. She stood framed in the doorway and the headlamps swept over her before John extinguished them. A moment later he came in, bringing the outside world into the bleak room. He put paperback novels and a liquor store brown bag on the scarred coffee table.
‘Thank you,’ Leonie said. It was different to see him away from the beach. To be alone together in these bare, banal surroundings was intimate, but at the same time they had slipped out of the beginnings of easiness with one another and back into a kind of anxious formality.
‘Shall I?’ He gestured at the wine he had brought.
‘I’ve got some chilled.’ She poured it into ugly glasses and handed one to John.
He was looking at the chairs and the rug, and in the quietness the moths batted against the lampshade. ‘What are you doing in this place?’ he asked in clear bewilderment.
She looked at him before answering, trying to fit together the impression she had built of him with the reality of this big, greying man, who had brought awkwardness into her cottage. At the same time she caught a glimpse of her own desperation, which now seemed to fade like a shadow behind her. Had it only taken the day’s one conclusive step to dispel it? ‘I’m thinking. Marshalling myself, I suppose.’
She told him about stopping in Haselboro and the connections that had brought her to rest here.
‘It’s a pretty horrible little place.’
‘Is it?’ She was genuinely surprised at his vehemence. It was the bareness and simplicity of the cottage that had appealed to her; a place for people without much money to spare, which was still a shelter and hiding-place in the woods. ‘Well, whatever. I suppose you’re right.’
‘How long will you stay?’
The way he wanted to impose limits and horizons surprised her too. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take some unpaid leave from my job and stay on for a while. Or perhaps I’ll just go back to Boston in a couple of days or a week and do what has to be done.’
‘Have you left him?’
She nodded her head. That much at least was certain. ‘Yes.’
‘Does he know?’
‘I think even Tom will probably have registered my absence by this time.’
‘I meant, does he think you’ve just flounced out and will come sliding back home in a day or so?’
‘Maybe. But I made quite an exit. I threw Marian’s shells over the porch.’ He didn’t know why she was laughing, she realised. ‘I’m not going back. Whatever happens from tonight onwards, I’m never going back to live with Tom.’
She picked up the wine jug and tilted it towards John’s glass but he half covered it with the palm of his hand. Leonie refilled her own glass instead and drank from it. ‘I’m glad to have something to read.’
‘I didn’t know what else I could bring you. If I had known …’ He couldn’t stop himself taking another look around the confines of the room.
‘I don’t need anything else.’
‘No. It seems extraordinary but I don’t believe you do.’
They smiled at each other then, the first time since his arrival.
‘I can even offer you dinner, of a kind.’
On the table in the kitchen Leonie laid out the cheese and fruit she had bought from Roger’s mother, and they sat down facing each other. In both of their minds was the temporary picture of domesticity they made together, and the questions and possibilities that spread out from it now into an unreadable future, like roots burrowing under the ground. Leonie found she was closing out the questions, deliberately pinching off the growths. This distance had been far enough to come for one day.
She leaned across the table instead, pouring the wine, making John talk as they ate. She wanted to listen to him and he obligingly answered the need, first with generalities, then by answering her questions with more telling details about his life and his children. It seemed he lived a self-contained existence now, even though he liked the company of women. Leonie warmed to his independence and to the streak of resilience that she understood was hidden by his pliant exterior. He told her about May not wanting him to come out to Haselboro.
‘I can understand why,’ Leonie said. ‘She wouldn’t want to share you, would she?’
There was a small silence. Then John covered her hand with his. Leonie remembered their lunch at Sandy’s, and the plate of cherries and the moment when she knew she didn’t love her husband any longer. This was just as much a crossing place, she realised, although she didn’t yet know quite what she should make of it.
‘Is it a question of sharing me?’ he asked her.
She gazed down at their joined hands, knowing that he deserved at least an attempt at an answer. And at the same time there was the old shadow of her despair slipping out of the periphery of her vision and disappearing. The way ahead looked suddenly bright and bare. ‘Maybe not yet.’
‘I see.’
They had finished eating. Leonie pushed back her chair and went around the table to take hold of him. ‘Come and lie down with me.’
He stood up but made no other move. A space yawned between them. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I know it’s a confusing message. It means I want to hold you and be close to you.’
‘We can try it.’
The bed had a wooden head and footboard, and a thin green cotton cover. The centre of the mattress seemed to contain the impression of a single large body. They were both smiling at the incongruity of it all as they lay down in one another’s arms. John put his mouth against her hair and she felt the warmth of his breath on her scalp when he whispered, ‘I couldn’t have dreamt of a more romantic setting.’
‘I thought not.’
They hugged the bubble of laughter between them and Leonie thought dizzily, Today I left my husband. Tomorrow I don’t know what will happen. To be happy was a sensation she had almost forgotten, but for all its inappropriateness it was what she did feel.
The bedroom window was a black eye staring at them. Leonie sat suddenly upright and swung out of bed to pull the dingy curtain across and block out the night. When she lay down again John held her and stroked her hair, and her neck beneath the veil of it. The comfort was all-enveloping. Leonie rested her head, letting her bones slowly sink into stillness. His warmth and the smell of him were benign, his breathing a steady rhythm against her heart. She sighed with satisfaction. ‘That is so good.’
‘Yes.’ A movement of his shoulder settled her face closer to his.
‘Can we just lie like this?’
‘Of course.’
The pure silence from beyond the cottage filled the dingy rooms and seemed to cleanse them. Leonie realised that the comfort it gave her was in the absence of the sea’s monotonous mumbling.
They lay in one another’s arms without the need for talk. The awkwardness of John’s arrival had all gone and the minutes slipped past them without being marked or counted. Leonie thought about the last time they had held each other, back in the Captain’s House, before the shock waves of shattering glass cut out the sound of the sea. Dreamily she envisaged sex as a hurtling meteor
ite, a nugget of inexplicable rock red-hot from its passage through the atmosphere between them. It was separate from each of them and belonged to neither, but it would gouge a crater far bigger than itself wherever it plunged to rest. Whereas this gender intimacy suffused with silence was infinite. It was space itself.
Physical desire had left her. Sex had become associated with her inability to conceive and had been one of the garments that clothed her unhappiness. She had been so unhappy the other night. And without warning May’s face upturned from her bleeding hand came back to her, with the same mute but fully legible lines of misery cut into it.
Is it a question of sharing me? John had asked.
Maybe not yet.
He should go home first to his children. It was already very late.
John’s eyes were open, studying her face. Leonie shifted her position and he misread her intention. He found her mouth with his and busily kissed her. The kiss was half answered, then it shrivelled between them.
‘Is this all wrong?’ he asked. ‘If you want me to walk away you must tell me and I’ll do it. I know how that’s done – it’s moving in the other direction I’ve forgotten about. Only I don’t want to be an instrument in the break-up of your marriage and I won’t offer you myself in exchange for Tom because in time you’ll come to resent the terms of the exchange even if they seem favourable now.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘I would like – yeah, I’d like to haul you off and make you mine in a cabin in the woods. A better one than this. I’d cut wood and draw water for you. Shoot bears, spear fish. Forget about business mail and art history books. How does that sound?’
‘Short or long term?’
‘Uh, long. Whatever that means,’ he corrected himself. ‘You know what the bear and fish world can be like.’
Leonie smiled. His deliberate conjuring of a fantasy world made his intentions as opaque as hers. And that was perfectly fair, she thought. Lightly she asked, ‘Can I get back to you?’
He took her face between his hands. ‘Is that what we’re saying? Not now, but maybe some time?’
‘Yes. That’s what I’m saying, at least.’
The creases at the corners of his eyes deepened. ‘I think that’s the right answer.’
He kissed her again. Then he unwrapped his arms and stood up, easing his shoulders and back, his height making him seem oversized in the cramped bedroom. Leonie wished for a moment that she had chosen now rather than some time. Instead she followed him out into the night, said goodbye and watched until the receding lights of the car had been swallowed up by the woodland.
When she was alone once more she experimentally turned off all the lights in the cabin. The instant darkness made flowers of retinal colour explode within her eyelids, but there was no menace in the star-shapes nor any threat in the night’s mossy silence.
In the Captain’s House after Ivy had gone May forced herself to process through the rooms, throwing open the doors and staring in at the unmoving shapes of chairs and tables. There was nothing here, nothing to be afraid of, but still she shivered with currents of fear. Being alone made her think of Doone and the pale face of the island woman.
When she came back again into the downstairs room she pressed her face against the window with its broken pane and tried to see into the night. Then it came to her that her outline would be thrown up in sharp relief against the yellow lamplight and that all the house would be punctured with a collage of window squares. Quickly she retreated and flicked the wall switches that brought the dark inside.
When her eyes accommodated themselves she could see clearly enough to move around. She switched on the television. Immediately nodding heads with wide mouths filled the screen, and a babble of laughter and applause assaulted her ears. She found the remote control and aimed it at the noise so that it faded at once into silence, although her ears still rang with it. For a minute or two she gazed uncomprehendingly at the overanimated faces. The colour balance was off and the skins were greenish, the lips orange and puckered like weird specimens of marine life.
Oily waves of disgust heaved beneath May’s breastbone.
Colour bled out from the screen and lent the darkness an eerie glow.
She pointed the remote like a weapon again and the set clicked off. Now the refrigerator started into life with a low hum. Her ears were painfully over-attuned to the small noises of the house. There were the creaks of wooden boards and a tiny clinking, which might have been two pieces of crockery vibrating in harmony with the refrigerator motor.
May slipped to the stairs and crept upwards, setting her feet silently on each tread. The house was all in darkness now. She receded into her room and set the door open by the smallest crack, not wanting to shut herself in. At first there was no differential in the blacknesses contained by the hair’s breadth of space looking out into the hallway and within the room itself. But as she sat on her bed with her spine drawn rigid she was able gradually to pick out the chest that held her clothes and the bookshelves where Doone’s book lay in its place.
She reached out for it and held it. The red binding of the spine was peeling a little at one corner.
She knew by heart the last words Doone had written. She had been unable to forget them, ever since she had unlocked them with the help of Hannah Fennymore’s whaling story.
I feel so sick with myself and the world.
I love him, every bone in me loves him, and I will never have him.
I want to die. It would be best for me to die.
The sea fretted and whispered beneath the window. In May’s sharpened hearing the murmur grew louder and louder, swelling as if her head were empty except for the pearly whorls of a giant shell. Her legs were unsteady when she stood up and the floor dipped beneath her like the deck of a ship under way. It was a long way to the window, much further than the thirteen steps she knew it to be.
She looked out at the island. It was a black hump rising out of the silvery water but tonight there were lights on the crescent beach. There was a reddish glow near the waterline, a driftwood fire that would be sending bright sparks up into the salt air. There were smaller, dancing pinpoints round about that looked like torches. It was Ivy and Lucas and the others, Gail and Kevin and Joel and the rest of the cousins, and some of the kids from Pittsharbor. They had all gone out to the island and they were having a party.
May could hear their voices and meaningless laughter rising and falling within the sea-washed shell of her head. ‘Hey, Kevin. Just chill, willya? This grass is like, amazing. Whoo, unreal.’
And there was Lucas, with Ivy, their arms forgivingly wound around each other. Even now the physical imprint of him seemed burnt into May’s skin, and she shivered with the confusion of absence and jealousy.
I love him, every bone in me loves him.
The impoverished and eloquent second-hand words of Doone’s lament twined and echoed with the other voices.
Yet it wasn’t Lucas Doone had loved so tragically.
I’m not her, May whispered to herself – I don’t, I don’t have to submerge myself like Doone did – if only the sea were not so loud and the house so silent and shadowed. Lucas was beautiful but he was ordinary, too, a chip of reality; the sweaty scent of him stayed in the back of her throat and she knew for certain that he was unconnected with any of this mess of darkness and water.
But if Lucas had never been Doone’s fatal love, then who was it whose name she could never write even in her private diary?
Gently May laid the red-and-black book back in its place on the shelf.
She was standing at the window looking across the silver sheet of water towards the island when she heard the first soft footstep crossing the downstairs room. The old floor-boards creaked under an invisible weight. There was another step and then another, measured and unhurried. But no one had come into the house; she would have heard Ivy come in through the porch doors and John’s car hadn’t pulled up at the front of the house. The footsteps sto
pped and their hesitation froze her heart so that its beat faltered.
Something was coming for her, searching for her.
A liquid wash of terror poured through May. She couldn’t allow herself to be trapped here in Doone’s bedroom. Sometimes the door wouldn’t open, as though an invisible shoulder held it tight, but it was open by a hair’s breadth now, just as she had left it. She forced herself into motion, although fear locked her limbs. Her mouth dried with wordless gratitude for being barefoot as she slipped out of the room. The house itself had become a listening shell, the silence noisy with whispers and sighs. May hung for an instant in the black hallway, motionless as a suit of clothes in a wardrobe, all her being trying to focus on what the threat might be. There was someone near, she could feel it in the tiny currents that electrified her skin.
As silently as a moving shadow she flitted across the stairhead. She could see no one in the narrow segment of the room visible at the foot.
John’s bedroom door stood wide open. She melted into the blackness behind it and with her chest bursting and blood hammering in her head took the first breath since the footsteps had halted. They were moving again now. They came unhurriedly across the room to the foot of the stairs.
May retreated step by step until her knees came into contact with the edge of her father’s bed. The steps advancing up the stairs now sounded as loud as a drumbeat. There was a shaft of light, lapping up the walls outside and sending a moving slice of visibility around the angle of the open door and across a wedge of floor. She stared in mute horror at the pattern revealed in the rug, then like a leaf falling she crumpled sideways into the bedcovers. She drew her knees up to her chest and pulled a blanket over her head. Her eyes squeezed shut and her breath stopped in her chest as she lay and waited to be found.
The bedclothes next to her face smelled of her father’s body. When she was little she used to run into her parents’ bedroom and climb into the warm hollow between them. She remembered that her father’s smell was always strong but good, like hay or sawn wood. It came back to her now, and the memory of safety and security with it like a glimpse of a lost world.