by Rosie Thomas
‘What do you expect? And why didn’t anyone talk about what was happening to us?’
‘Partly because of history, because of Jack O’Donnell, I guess. I knew that Dad and Ali weren’t that happy, that she might well have gone anyway. She left in a big way, though.’
May thought about the image she had crumpled up and stuffed away in her unconscious. When she unfolded it she saw it was only two people on a sofa. Having sex, Ivy said, having sex, that was what people did. As she considered the scene now, chips of disgust flaked away from it, diminishing its lurid brilliance and leaving a blurred image that seemed more striking for its banality than for anything else. Men and women, husbands and wives, were unfaithful to each other. It was sad. But it wasn’t grotesque, loomingly fearful or threatening. It was just people.
‘And partly Dad himself,’ Ivy added. She spoke quietly, without emphasis.
‘What did he do?’
‘Nothing. That’s just it. He’s not like Ali.’
They contemplated the vividness of her, or the flashes and reflections and dressings-up of it that were left in their memories. They would not say it aloud but they acknowledged that John was passive by comparison, a done-to man rather than a doer.
‘There’s nothing wrong with that,’ May defended him, out of love.
‘Of course there isn’t.’
They were quiet for a moment. Absently Ivy reached for May’s Walkman but she set the earpieces swinging in little opposing arcs instead of putting them in her ears.
May felt grateful for this indication that the conversation wasn’t over. ‘Do you think he’ll, you know, get someone else in the end?’ she asked.
Ivy sighed. ‘I suppose. I don’t know why he should be lonely, living with us, but he seems to be.’ Her face was so ironically expressive that May laughed out of pure affection.
‘I’m sorry I punched you.’
‘If we’re in apology mode I’m sorry I said what I did about Mom and Jack O’Donnell. I’m sorry I wasn’t on the island when you came looking, I’m sorry you fell into an old cellar and hit your head and hurt your shoulder, and we didn’t find you until you climbed out on your own. I’m sorry I haven’t been there for you all along, like I should have been, poor motherless girls that we are. Um, is there anything else?’
‘That seems pretty much to cover it. Don’t break my Walkman.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Mom won’t come back, will she?’ May said. The observation was important because it was final, at last. ‘Nothing any of us does will mean anything different.’
She remembered climbing out of the pit and the determination that she would do it because she wanted to go on with her life. Not like Doone. Not like Sarah.
She wasn’t going to tell Ivy about the ghosts because Ivy would classify all that with clothes-cutting and tree-hugging. Her sister was so sure of what she knew May thought. Ivy had suffered enough, and yet she had managed to turn out so strong and smart. Better than smart; Ivy had a kind of wisdom, May realised. She admired her older sister as much as she had always done, but now it was admiration rooted in more valuable traits.
‘You’re right, I should be like you. Concentrate on myself as a work of art.’
‘Mm. I wouldn’t go as far as pulling your teeth,’ Ivy said kindly. ‘It would be a backward step. A waste of the braces.’
‘Do you want Dad to find someone else?’
‘Yes, I do. It’s time he did. But all the ones he’s had up to now have been such compromises. Like he wanted to please us by not going for anything too noticeable. Suzanne, for one.’
‘“Good accessories are so important,”’ May intoned.
‘Jesus.’
‘Do you think it could be Leonie?’
‘I haven’t a clue. What happens is what happens. But I think maybe we shouldn’t stand in his way so much any more.’
May dropped her head to pick at the bedsheet and looked up again. Her cut hand was healed now. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
‘Hey, there’s another drama. Judith’s left Marty.’
‘Why?’
‘D’you think they’d tell me? Next thing, the Fennymores will be splitting.’
It was something to do with the diary. Marty had seemed the incarnation of threat when he came on her through the trees; even now she could taste the sour rush of fear in her mouth. Yet he had held her and stroked her hair, and told her she was safe. Judith’s leaving him was something to do with Doone, of course. Last summer bleeding into this one, the past interfering with the present, for ever and ever. Faces watching from within the circle of trees.
‘Are you okay?’ Ivy asked.
‘Um, I’m thirsty again. I’d like some Coke.’
‘I’ll get you some,’ Ivy said tenderly.
The next afternoon Leonie came. May stared at her in surprise. She brought with her a bundle of magazines and two bottles of Hard Candy nail-polish, pale sky-blue and a gooseberry green with flakes of glitter suspended in it. She sat down on the bed. ‘Hi, I didn’t know what to buy you, so I got these.’
‘That’s neat. Really neat.’ May struggled to unscrew the seal of the green one, but her hurt shoulder hampered her.
‘Let me.’ Leonie undid the bottle and feathered the brush invitingly with polish.
May unclenched her fists and reluctantly spread her fingers apart. She had cleaned the earth out from under the nail tips. ‘I’ve got horrible nails,’ she muttered. Their bent heads almost touched as Leonie deftly painted. She spread the little brush and worked it to the nail margins with smooth strokes, like a proper manicurist. When both hands were done May held them up in front of her to judge the sparkling effect. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I like that a lot.’
‘How are you?’
May loved the nail polish. She would never have bought it for herself; it was Ivy’s kind of stuff, so she would have pretended to despise it. But this gesture of Leonie’s seemed to admit May at a stroke into a world inhabited by her sister and her sister’s friends. Leonie hadn’t brought her a little girl’s present, or something boring like fruit or books. She had bought glitter-green Hard Candy and May understood that she had chosen it because she knew it was the right gift. Gratitude made her smile straight back at Leonie.
‘I’m okay.’
Leonie nodded. ‘I heard you were. But I thought I’d come by, just to see. I know you’ll be going back to the city as soon as you’re well enough.’
She had had the briefest of telephone conversations with John, all of it concerned with May. The vacation was over. Tacitly they avoided the question of whether the two of them might see each other again.
‘Do you want to come out for a walk with me?’ May asked abruptly. She hoisted herself out of the bedside chair. ‘I’m allowed to go out in the grounds. It’s so hot and stuffy in here, I feel I can’t breathe half the time.’
‘I’d like that. Is your polish dry?’
‘I won’t smudge it. I’ll wave my hands around.’
The hospital was backed by a small park. They walked down a path bordered with hydrangea bushes, the mophead blooms turning dry and rusty as if they were already set out in basket-shop dried-flower displays.
‘Are you going back to the city too?’
Leonie answered easily, ‘I think I’ll stay on here for a while. I can do some work and I like my cabin up in the woods.’
They made a slow circuit of the park. May blinked at the flowerbeds where summer daisies were giving way to pink and purple asters with cobwebs spun between them. The colours seemed emphatically bright and she realised that the warmth spreading through her was happiness.
Leonie was walking with her head down, her hands in her pockets. ‘Tom and I have separated, you know.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know, is that the right thing to say?’
‘Probably. For the time being. In the end I should think we’ll both be happier, but that doesn’t make it any the less sad now.’
They came to a benc
h under a plane tree. The circle of butts spread around indicated that it was where the hospital smokers came and the sight reminded Leonie of Pittsharbor churchyard. She had sat talking to Elizabeth, who had warned her not to let life’s chances pass her by for fear of regretting the missed opportunities.
They sat down in the tree’s shelter and May tapped her nails so the flecks of glitter caught the light. ‘I didn’t understand anything much, before,’ she attempted. ‘When I saw you with my father and smashed the window. It wasn’t out of jealousy, not really. I just needed him to be my dad, you know? I didn’t want to see him like he was with you. Do you mind me saying that?’
Leonie lifted her head and their eyes met. May thought it must be the first time they had looked at each other properly. They sensed the fluttery movements of estimation as liking measured up against mistrust. ‘Not if it’s what you feel.’
May said, ‘The whole world seemed made up of sex. Everywhere I looked. It was seething, dripping from everyone. Even the old people, not just Ivy and Lucas.’
‘It can seem that way.’
‘I’ve got it in better perspective now.’
‘That’s good,’ Leonie said gravely.
‘What changed it was that I more or less did it with Lucas. On Pittsharbor night.’
Compassion and concern flooded Leonie’s face. May was touched by the sight of it. ‘May, you’re very young. What happened?’
‘I was wasted, so was he. Nobody’s fault except mine. It wasn’t anything amazing. You know?’
Leonie smiled. ‘Yes. I do know. Did you want to because of competing with Ivy?’
‘In a way. But it’s just what people do, isn’t it?’
She wouldn’t tell even Leonie that it was also because of Doone, because she had thought Lucas was Doone’s lover, that she was herself entwined with Doone. Anyway, had that really been the truth?
It was true that Doone had died because of sex. And so had Sarah Corder, betrayed by it. May bit her lip. It wasn’t just anything, however much she wanted to diminish it.
Leonie took her thoughts and echoed them. ‘It isn’t just what people do, May. When it’s good, sex is better than anything you know or could imagine; more exotic and more absorbing, and funnier and prouder and simpler. You can’t forget it or rub it out, it’s like a song running in your head, which carries itself down your spine and all through your bones. It’s being so close to another person that they become you. Better than you could ever be separately.’ Her words amazed her even as she spoke them, although she knew them to be true. She had thought that physical desire had deserted her and now she knew that it would come back.
‘I can’t imagine.’
‘You’ll discover for yourself. Not for a while, perhaps. Not with Lucas Beam, I shouldn’t think.’
May laughed. The notion of Lucas was surprisingly diminished, it took up hardly any space in her mind now. ‘Is it like you say for you and my father?’
Leonie hesitated, then said sadly, ‘No. Not right now, anyway.’
May was embarrassed, feeling she had trespassed too far. ‘I haven’t helped things between you that much, have I?’
‘Maybe not. But the truth is, if it’s going to happen it doesn’t need much help or hindrance.’
‘I think I understand that, at least, after what you’ve told me.’
Leonie took her hand and squeezed it quickly, then let it go because she was afraid that May might object to such a demonstration. ‘You’re okay,’ she told her, and it was an appreciation and a wider assurance as well as being to do with her injuries.
They left the bench and walked the circuit of the park once more.
When they came inside they found Ivy sitting by May’s bed. She was rattling the bottles of nail-polish on the bed table and yawning, but she jumped up as soon as she saw the two of them. She was wearing a halter top and checked capri pants, and with the summer’s end her arms and shoulders were brown and smooth as a bolt of mocha silk. ‘Dad’s just coming,’ she said, eyeing Leonie in surprise. ‘He stopped off to buy some shit for you, May.’
‘I’ll go,’ Leonie said quickly. She didn’t want him to think she was contriving a meeting, here of all places, or intruding into his family. ‘Get well soon,’ she said to May. ‘And good luck, if I don’t see you before you go back to the city.’ She ducked her head at Ivy, an awkward greeting and goodbye in one.
‘Thanks for the stuff,’ May called after her.
It was too late. Leonie saw John advancing up the white-lit tunnel of the hall. There was no detour she could make and he had already seen her. They stopped, too close together under the inquisitorial lights, and stepped a pace apart again.
‘I just looked in to see how she is.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I can imagine what you must have felt like, all that time she was missing …’ Leonie broke off, reddening. ‘At least, I can’t imagine because I don’t have a child of my own. But I thought about you.’
There was no explaining why she hadn’t felt it right to go to him and help to share the vigil. It was to do with presumption and also with offering what she feared being unable to sustain. But the withholding of her support made her feel small and mean in retrospect.
‘Thank you,’ he said again and added brutally, ‘I missed Alison. I wanted her to be there so we could endure it side by side. It was the first time in a long time I have actually cried for her.’
Leonie acknowledged the admission with a brief dip of her head. There seemed to be no more to add; the tranquillity she had been feeling and the hypothetical flare of rekindled lust were not relevant here and now. She held out her hand and he took it briefly.
‘Ivy and I have been packing up. I thought perhaps May wouldn’t want to go back to that place and anyway we’ve only got a couple more days’ vacation left. I don’t know.’ He was asking her for a pointer.
‘I’m going to stay on at the cabin for a while.’
They were both thinking of the green bedspread, the hollowed mattress. Not now, but maybe some time; that was what they had agreed, could it be only three nights ago?
Just as she had done at the beginning, in the Pittsharbor car-park, Leonie moved close and kissed him on the mouth. ‘If I do decide to move on, Elizabeth Newton will always know where to find me,’ she said. She walked away from him, the rubber soles of her sneakers drawing a small squeak out of the plastic-tiled floor.
John found Ivy and May sitting head to head as May painted Ivy’s fingernails. They were laughing together about something and with the same movement they turned their flushed faces towards him. They were suddenly alike, the same mouths, the same slant to their eyes. It was tough, he thought, that they should have to have been taken to the brink of a tragedy before discovering their connectedness. But plenty of discoveries were tough and the routes to them no less so. Hope for the future lifted suddenly inside him and the lightness revealed itself in his face. His daughters were looking steadily at him.
‘Ivy said we could go straight home, but I don’t want to yet. I want to go back to Pittsharbor and finish everything off,’ May said.
He didn’t ask her what her unfinished business might be. ‘We can do that if you’re sure it’s what you want,’ he told her.
‘I’m sure.’ May bent her head again to concentrate on the sky-blue fingernails.
Fifteen
‘You put it back, didn’t you?’ May locked her eyes on him.
He stared at her bare sandy feet, at the floor, anywhere but into her face. She had come in from the seaward side, materialising at the screen door and boldly walking into the room, before Marty had a chance to withdraw or to hide from her. He could not know how much of May’s courage it had taken to propel herself here.
She repeated, ‘You crept into my room and took it, and you read it, then you put it back again so it would look as if it hadn’t been touched.’
The Stiegels’ house was in disarray. There were boxes and half-packed bags spilli
ng their contents on the floor, and already an atmosphere of neglect, as if dust motes were thickening in the stagnant air. The last grains of summer were running out, sand in an hourglass.
Marty straightened up and put down the concertina file he had held in his arms, reminding May that she had come across pictures of Doone by prying and snooping on her own part. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘I had to know what she had written about me.’
‘And did you find out what you wanted to know?’
‘It was in code, most of it.’
‘I told you that.’
There was a silence, in which they appraised each other. May held up her head, keeping her resolve firm.
No one knew she was here, unless she had been seen as she slipped up the Stiegels’ steps. She had told John she was going to call on Elizabeth, knowing that Elizabeth had driven to Pittsharbor with Spencer. It was a heavy, thundery afternoon with occasional fat drops of rain pockmarking the flat sea and the beach was almost deserted.
‘What do you want?’ Marty asked. He suddenly came a step closer and automatically, fearfully, May retreated by the same measure. It was as if they were dancing together.
But she did know exactly what she wanted: it was the first certainty she had ever had that was based on an adult’s perception, not a child’s.
She had dreamed about Marty Stiegel, in the hospital and twice more since she had come home to the Captain’s House. They were superficially harmless dreams in which he served a family dinner of live lobsters in the New York apartment, or appeared smiling in her classroom at school dressed in a Hallowe’en costume but with the mask held out in his hand for her to take. Yet there was an undercurrent to them, which stayed with her long after she had woken up, and she knew that it welled out of fear and washed in a cold flood right through her.
I want not to be afraid. The thought came to her as she sat on Doone’s bed, looking at the diary on the shelf. If she dammed it up the fear would still burst out in the end and carry her away. She could confide in her father, perhaps, or Elizabeth, or even Leonie, and there would be more sessions with Dr Metz and she would be treated with concern and sympathy, but she would still be a flood victim. I don’t want that, she thought. It would be to make herself passive again, to be at the mercy of fate or whatever random circumstances life threw at her, when she needed to be exactly the opposite.