by Rosie Thomas
In the very early morning it had rained again, a heavy shower that thinned to a drizzle, then stopped altogether. The light brightened and by ten o’clock the sun shone in a clear-washed sky. Warmth drew out the scents of pine and wet earth; the blameless beauty of the bay was an added reproach. The houses on the bluff stood out in sharp detail. There was no one to be seen on their decks or down on the beach because everyone was either out with the searchers or sitting inside, waiting. Up among the early arrivals from the town who were setting out their towels and folding chairs for the day near the Pittsharbor steps, two police officers were moving from group to group, asking questions.
Ivy sat in an upright chair at the kitchen table, turning a cup of cold coffee in scraping circles. ‘I was such a bitch to her,’ she owned flatly.
‘No you weren’t.’
‘Maybe not all the time. If she comes back – God, if she’s all right, I swear …’
‘I know,’ John said. He paused beside her chair and Ivy turned her face against his sleeve.
They remembered separately the distorting glass that had slid between them and the world after Alison’s death. Looking through it at ordinary life had been to see the world foreshortened, stripped of luminescence and the resonance of promise. The glass shivered in the wings again now, grief waiting to assail them.
‘I was thinking about Alison,’ Ivy whispered.
‘I know,’ John repeated.
‘What did you feel when she died?’
‘Guilty.’
‘You weren’t the guilty one. Neither was she, after she was dead, was she? Only we couldn’t talk about her because of what had been wrong and her dying so suddenly was a kind of door that closed her off. I liked it that May didn’t know about her affair because it kept the goodness of her, the way May believed in it.
‘Then I had to go and spill it out. Do you think it’s why May went off?’
‘No,’ he said, hoping it was the truth. He was tidying the worktop restlessly, unseeingly, as he spoke. He slotted kitchen knives back into the wooden block where they belonged. ‘When she comes back, when we’re together again, we’ll talk to each other about your mother. It isn’t too late.’
Their fear was that too late was exactly what it was.
A woman police officer came to the door. She didn’t try to soften the news: the Beams’ rowing dinghy had been found empty, the oars thrown inside it, two miles down the coast on the rocks at Hays Landing. There was no way of telling if May had taken it there and abandoned it, or if it had been carried from elsewhere and washed up by the tide.
Leonie left the Saab parked outside the Flying Fish and walked the rest of the way to the bluff. Another call to the Beams – this time she had spoken only to Karyn – told her there was no more news of May. It was unbearable to think of staying up in the Haselboro cabin, although she didn’t want to go back to Marian’s house and she could hardly intrude herself at John’s. She kept to the far, shady side of the road when she reached the Fennymores’ driveway and with her head bent moved quickly towards Elizabeth’s. Elizabeth opened her door immediately.
‘Can I wait here with you?’ Leonie blurted. ‘I don’t want to be so far away.’
Elizabeth held the door wider. ‘I’d be glad of the company. Alexander and Spencer have gone with Marty. They’re out on the island. The boat’s been found, did you hear?’
Leonie’s eyes widened. ‘And?’
‘That’s all. Nothing else.’
Looking around the table Lucas mumbled, ‘She asked me if I thought she was like Doone.’ He put down his hunk of sandwich only half eaten. The younger children gazed back solemn-faced and the adults frowned or picked at their food. ‘I said she wasn’t,’ he insisted. ‘Nothing like. We only went for a walk and fooled around for half an hour. She was kind of upset, yeah, but she made me leave her there. You know, I thought it was just girls’ stuff.’
Richard put down his fork. ‘You told the police all of this?’
‘Sure. It was the night before, anyway. But all the questions, right? It makes me feel like it’s my fault.’ No one said anything. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered uneasily. ‘I mean, they were totally different.’
‘Perhaps May didn’t think that. Perhaps she identified with Doone.’ It was Marian who said it, voicing the possibility everyone else left unspoken.
‘Not to the point of contriving to drown herself as well, surely?’ Karyn snapped.
‘That might depend on why she thought Doone did die,’ Elliot said quietly.
‘Jesus,’ Lucas said again. He got up and left the table, and even Kevin and Joel were silent.
Aaron didn’t fall asleep. He sat wrapped in a blanket in his chair beside the stove, watching the sunlight moving in rhomboids of dilute citrus yellow across the floorboards.
‘How long did Marian Beam stay?’ Hannah ventured.
‘Not long,’ he denied her.
Hannah went on with her work, glancing at him as she moved around the room with a duster, but they didn’t talk any more.
Judith telephoned her mother in Connecticut and held the baby up to the mouthpiece so her grandmother could hear her gurgle.
‘Where’s Marty?’ she asked when Justine was restored to her bouncing chair.
Judith explained that he had joined the search for a missing teenager.
‘Another one?’
‘It’s not the same,’ Judith said quickly. ‘Last year there was a drowning accident. It happens, doesn’t it? I think this kid has just run off somewhere. She had an argument with her sister or something.’
‘Are you all right, Judith?’ Her mother was a widow, prone to anxiety and over-protectiveness of her only daughter.
‘Of course I am. Justine’s teething, that’s all.’ She was regretting the call now and the anxiety of isolation that had driven her to make it was only intensified.
‘And Marty?’
‘Of course. He’s just doing what he can to help.’
After she had managed to extricate herself from the conversation Judith squatted on the floor opposite the baby. Justine’s face split into a smile at once, showing tiny white chips of teeth embedded in crescents of gum.
Uneasiness shifted and compressed itself inside Judith’s rib-cage, at odds with the exuberance of her passion for the child. It was only when she became a mother that she had identified the similarity, but Marty who seemed so certain and formed when she married him also had a childlike aspect. He needed her protection, just as the baby did, although it was disturbing that she couldn’t define properly how or why.
And now her own mother had scented today’s unease, all the way from Connecticut, and it was seeding itself there too. The corners of Judith’s mouth turned down in an approximation of a smile at the thought of this inexorable connection between mothers and daughters.
She held out her hand and Justine grabbed at it, double-fisted. Her co-ordination was improving every day. ‘I’ll be here,’ Judith promised her. ‘I always will.’
All day along the beach and the bluff, ripples of dread ran like a powerful tide coming in over the sand. The five houses were joined by its fingers, the same image of a waterlogged body haunting each of them.
*
Elizabeth and Leonie couldn’t bear to stay inside where the air was weighty and stagnant, and the silence oppressed them. They went out into the garden, making a tour of it from the lane side round to the front of the house overlooking the beach. Elizabeth pointed out the dead heads and showed Leonie how to nip them off with a sharp snap of the secateurs. They worked together in the sweetness of the borders, stretching and kneeling, and teasing out weeds from between the kniphofias and hydrangea bushes. By concentrating fiercely on the job they were able to bear the terrible waiting. Leonie thought, Maybe some day I could have a garden, with roses and thyme and lavender bushes. Tom had never wanted anything more than a small yard with an elaborate barbecue. To concentrate on such things helped her to think beyond today, with its rising swell
of dread.
Marty dragged his aching legs through the next tangle of briars. The slope to the crest of the island was steep and bare of trees on this part of the seaward side. The rock was clearly visible in bald grey patches between the vegetation like a skull beneath tufts of hair.
Spencer and Alexander were further down the slope at distances of ten and twenty yards. They had agreed on this as the way to cover the most ground in their search. Marty was vaguely surprised by their stamina and tenacity. He thought he was strong himself, but he was breathless and flagging in comparison with them. The dragging progress over the inhospitable island was exhausting and the pointlessness of it chafed at him. He could only think of finding the girl and it seemed impossible that they were doing anything but wasting time up here. Clearly the police thought the same. ‘She took the boat,’ he panted during one of their rest stops. ‘Surely we’d be more useful working down the shore instead of up here?’
‘My mother is convinced she would have come across to the island and I trust her instincts. I always think there’s a bit of the witch in her.’
Marty gritted his teeth. He hated Spencer’s feyness and the suspicion that the two of them had asked him to join their search with the intention of watching him, of keeping him in view. To underline his innocence he could only agree, and keep walking and searching and calling her name through the mild afternoon heat. Spencer and Alexander thought he was guilty.
The summer afternoons of a year ago returned to his mind with perfect and unwelcome clarity. He knew how it had begun and how the entrancement had advanced by stages, so tiny as to seem unimportant, until the threshold of guilt had long been passed and nothing could be done to retrieve innocence for either of them.
But the diary had revealed nothing incriminating. Unless the code, the passionate scribbled numbers, gave him away. If it did happen that May was dead and if he had only destroyed the diary instead of panicking and putting it back, what other danger was there? He would have been safe from last summer. It would be his word against Spencer Newton’s, no evidence but an account of a photographer taking photographs on a sunny afternoon.
Marty toiled on across the thorny slope.
May opened her eyes again. Huge segments of time seemed to pass, yet she couldn’t populate them with thoughts or sensations beyond generalised pain and tormenting thirst.
The light over her head was hard and bright. How many hours or days had she been lying here? Would she have been missed? Were they searching for her?
Somewhere in a dream or delirium she had been calling out for her mother, the name was still shaped on her tongue. She was more properly conscious now; it was her father she wanted and Ivy.
The thought of Ivy filled her mind. Ivy was so admirable and strong. She only felt angry with her because she was so effortlessly what she herself wanted to be. There was no space left to fill because Ivy already occupied it, yet it was exactly the shape in the world that May wanted too. Of course jealousy would make her angry. It wasn’t Ivy’s fault, how could it be? Weak tears collected in May’s eyes at the thought of how much she loved her. She pressed one finger into her eye socket and tried to lick the moisture off it. Her tongue was swollen and cracked.
Ivy would be worried. Ivy worried about her if she was an hour late coming home, although she pretended not to. ‘Don’t make me, you little bitch,’ she had snarled once, only once.
‘You don’t have to worry about me.’
‘Yes I do. Don’t you understand anything? There’s no one else to do it.’
It became suddenly of supreme, immense importance to relieve Ivy of anxiety. No one was going to come and get her out of here, not Ali or John or anyone else. She would have to extricate herself or die in a hole. Leave Ivy. Screw things up for her for good. The whispers would follow her. Her mom died, then her kid sister… did you hear?… Ivy would have to be harder and brighter and tougher than ever to make up for it.
Climb.
Climb out of here and crawl home.
There was the singing again. Fucking singing. Ah, far away. Ah, far far away. Only it was Lucas’s voice this time. Shit, it was a dream. What else could it be? Start climbing, okay?
The lip of the hole wasn’t so far away. Perhaps twice the height of her head. Forget the cage of pain and the thirst, which had become the size of another complete individual shrieking inside her. She reached up with clawed hands to the stones that jutted overhead. A knuckle of rock made a place to wedge her foot. Her face scraped against the sour earth.
Not that way. The better way was to press her back to the side of the hole and jam her feet against the opposite face. It hurt her legs and there was a hot pain stabbing through her braced shoulders. A shower of small stones and chunks of earth rattled down, but she was able to lever herself up by a foot, then a few more inches. The light overhead seemed to come no closer and the pain radiated from her shoulders to possess the rest of her. She braced herself once again and shuffled another step upwards, then one more. But the effort of holding her legs straight was too much. Her knees folded and she fell back down, the shock of the impact jarring a moan out of her.
She raised herself on all fours and looked upwards again. She saw that the only route was after all to climb, using the knobs and tiny protruding ledges of stone. This time she moved slowly, considering each hand and foothold. Whenever she achieved an upward lift she hung motionless for a long moment, her face pressed to the wall, conserving her tiny store of energy. For a long, agonising series of movements the sky seemed to come no closer.
Suddenly the bottom of the pit was far below, a considerable drop. If she fell now she would be badly hurt; to climb up again would be impossible. The lip of the hole was within reach of her fingers as they strained upwards. She brought her feet level and hung on with her fingertips. She could see nowhere that might offer the next foothold.
Up. She focused on the thought with the last reserves of her willpower. There was a place about ten inches above her present toehold, no more than a shallow groove, but it might be enough. Cautiously she slid her right foot upwards, jammed it into the recess and tested her weight on it. Her fingers scrabbled higher and somehow the purchase held. Now her right hand found roots and stems growing beyond the edge of the hole. She grasped them and brought her left foot level with the right. Her body was balanced on her toes, her fists desperately clutching the grasses. There was a jutting stone higher to the left. She planted her foot and launched herself upwards, and there was an agonising moment when she had to give up her handhold and grope for another beyond it. She found a thorny stem, which tore her palm, but still she grabbed and hauled herself up by it. Both feet were level again, her face was mockingly tickled by the fronds of grass.
Her breath sobbed in her throat.
‘Help me,’ May whispered, but she had no expectation that help would come. There was no island woman, no Doone; neither Ivy nor her father would hear her entreaty. There was no membrane either, nothing but herself and the whistling emptiness of the brightening air.
‘Again,’ she commanded.
She tested her handholds by pulling on them. They seemed firm enough. Then she sprang up from the foothold. Her feet flailed and scraped as she tried for a purchase. It seemed that she was slipping downwards, but somehow she hoisted her hips over the edge of the hole.
Her feet swung in empty air and her face was smothered with soil and wet leaves. She dragged one knee over, then the other. She found herself crouched on all fours, panting like a dog.
Above her was the broken-down stone wall of what had once been the whalers’ refuge. Behind and higher up the slope was the oak tree. The chinks of sky visible through the canopy of leaves were a mild, smoky blue.
May began to crawl up towards the humped back of the island. Her hands were tom but she couldn’t find the strength to stand upright.
Marty had lost sight of Spencer and Alexander. He thought he must have crested the ridge and begun the descent before them. Either the
y were still on the landward side and were out of sight and earshot, or the agreed distance between them had widened and they were much further over to his right. He stopped walking and cocked his head to listen. There was the raucous screaming of the gulls and the rustle of the sea, and he made an effort to block them out. There was something or someone moving in the scrub below him; too far down the slope and in the wrong direction to be Spencer Newton.
Marty took a step forward, then another, and stopped to listen again. The crackle of leaves and twigs had stopped. ‘May?’ he called. ‘May, Ma-aa-ay …’
There was an answer, a thin cry: ‘Help me.’
He broke into a run, wildly crashing forward and slowing immediately because he made too much noise. She was still below him, not far away now, he could hear the repeated cry much more clearly. He ducked under the shade-spreading branches of an old tree and saw her. The tiny white oval of her face was turned imploringly upwards.
May knew that rescue and safety were approaching, then she saw who it was.
She understood everything that had happened in a sudden blinding instant and the knowledge made fear hit her all over again. It turned to a hammer-blow that made splinters of pain fire off in her chest so that she stopped crawling and crouched with her arms crossed to protect herself.
She was afraid of him. As soon as he was close enough he saw it and smelt it, a sharp, feral scent. Her fear ignited a flare of panic in him and at once his head was twisting, his eyes scanning the ranks of trees for witnesses. They were alone in the woods, no one else had heard her. She had been lost. She needn’t be found. His fists tightened, white-knuckled, a terrible reflex.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ The words wrung themselves out of her, burning in her parched throat. ‘It was you who came and took her diary. You were the only one who knew about it.’
He took a step towards her. His hands hung heavy now, the fingers thick and clumsy.
‘It was you she loved.’