by Rosie Thomas
Gently Leonie said, ‘If I may, I’d like to. But first I have to go some distance on my own. I don’t know yet where I’ll be taking myself.’
‘I understand that.’
Elizabeth came out with a tray and glasses. There were vodka martinis for herself and Leonie, and cranberry juice in a frosted glass for May. Elizabeth raised hers to the two of them. ‘Safe journey,’ she said.
Over the rim of her tall glass May looked again across the water. There was a sailing ship in the bay. As she watched, it silently swept past Moon Island. The tall sails glimmered against the ridge of spruces and the long, steep bowsprit raked towards the southern headland where lines of breakers guarded the passage to the open sea.
The breath stopped in May’s chest. She tore a single sidelong glance away from the ship and saw that the other women were watching it too. Another flash of lightning seemed to pin the vessel to a sheet of steel. In the darkness that fell after it Leonie whispered, ‘It’s one of the windjammers up from Rockland.’
Elizabeth shook her head just once.
May knew it was no elegant windjammer. This ship was heavy, with blunt bows and a sawn-off square transom. The fore and main masts were square-rigged, the mizzen fore-and-aft-rigged. And between the fore and main masts the deck was blocked by the looming brick try-works. She knew exactly, from the descriptions and the old engravings in Voyages of the Dolphin, what a whaling ship looked like. She reached out and with her fingertips stroked the book on the cushion beside her.
The ship sailed majestically away from them. It rode the breaking crests of the waves between the island and the mainland shore, and gained the open water beyond. They watched until it passed out of their sight beyond the southern headland. After it had gone they heard a sigh, distinct in the silence before the storm broke, like a breath exhaled from the beach and the rocks. It whispered in their ears and the three women sat still, not needing to speak or even to look at one another. They were connected now. The threads of understanding would grow stronger, and draw them deeper into friendship.
When May lifted her glass her teeth rattled against the rim. Elizabeth and Leonie drank too, and she noticed that under the porch lantern the lines of doubt and anxiety were smoothed out of their faces. The lightning flashed again, illuminating the deserted bay and printing its emptiness behind their eyes.
‘I’m glad I saw that. I’ve never seen a ship so beautiful,’ Leonie said. A vicious clap of thunder drowned her last word. Almost at once a scatter of raindrops ricocheted off the path. May stood up and took the books into her arms. She hunched her shoulders to protect them, then bent down and awkwardly kissed Leonie’s cheek. ‘Goodbye. Will you come and see my dad?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Leonie promised. ‘And you and Ivy.’
May was glad that Elizabeth got up and followed her across the garden to the side entry, past the glimmering moon-faces of the anemones and the extinguished blaze of brighter flowers. Benign raindrops spattered on their arms and shoulders. In the seclusion of the far side of the house they stopped and looked at each other.
‘I saw it,’ May said, as if Elizabeth might have doubted her.
All the windows in the Captain’s House were lit up, making it look like a boat itself, riding at anchor against the clouds. Music floated from it, flattened by the humid air. Ivy and Lucas must be at home.
‘He came for her at last,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He’s taken her away.’ She could feel that a weight had lifted from the beach. Sadness had broken up and drifted away, like fog in the sun.
‘I hope so,’ May said uncertainly. For herself she didn’t want to sense the membrane again, or to risk breaking through it to whatever lay on the other side. She held the diary tight against her, the corner digging into the fold of her arm. Quickly, not trying to choose the words, she told Elizabeth where she had found it. Nothing more than that. ‘What should I do with it?’
Elizabeth didn’t hesitate. ‘You should send it to her parents. It was hers, they would want to have it. They will know where it belongs, don’t you think?’
She nodded, grateful, and leaned forward and kissed Elizabeth’s cheek more gently and gracefully than she had managed with Leonie. It was an easier meeting and parting to negotiate. ‘Thank you,’ May said.
Her face in the house lights, young and soft-featured and full of life, made Elizabeth smile and catch her breath at the same time. ‘Thank you,’ Elizabeth echoed her.
May ran down the driveway and along the bluff road. She kept her eyes fixed ahead, but if she had looked towards the Stiegels’ she would have seen Marty lifting the last of his bags into the rental car before setting off.
Hannah opened the door after a long interval. May held up the books, keeping the red-and-black diary in the other hand, the weak one. ‘I’ve come to return these. And to say goodbye. We’re leaving in the morning.’
The big room with its clutter of books and curios was shadowy and smelt of long-enclosed air. Aaron was in his chair next to the stove, Hannah had been sitting at the table, writing by the light of the single lamp. She took the two books from May and slotted them back into their places on the shelves.
Aaron beckoned her closer with a yellow finger. ‘You came to no harm, then?’
‘Not really.’
‘At your age you mend easily, if you’re made right. You’re nothing like the other one. Where are you going?’
‘Back home. Back to the city. The vacation’s over.’
But he had already lost interest, she saw, maybe even forgotten who she was. His mouth loosened and his eyes abandoned their focus, turning inwards instead to look at what she could not see. The terrible remoteness of old age struck her for the first time: Aaron was like a relic from another world. He seemed ten years older than the last time she had seen him, and much smaller and more palpably frail. Her legs felt like trees as she towered over him, her back like a pillar. She touched her free hand quickly to his shoulder and almost kissed the top of his head. Through the sparse hair she saw his scalp, blotched and discoloured with liver spots, and pity and distaste rose in her mouth He gave no sign in return.
Hannah was at her side. ‘Did you find them interesting?’ She nodded at the shelf where she had replaced the books.
‘I did. In a way.’
‘Yes. The Pointed Firs book is a Maine classic, of course. All you summer visitors like to read it. But the Dolphin story, that’s different. My son Bobby found it in a second-hand bookstore and bought it for me, knowing my interest in such things.’
May nodded. This was a long speech for Hannah Fennymore.
‘I often wonder if Sarah Corder was our island Sarah.’
May followed her gaze as it travelled beyond the blurred glass of the window to Moon Island. It lay low in the water, a spiny black hump against the graphite sky. ‘Perhaps,’ she said reluctantly. She wanted to shake off all these stories now. ‘Did Doone think she might have been?’
Hannah shrugged. ‘I don’t know if Doone ever read it. She kept the books for long enough, but she never gave me the impression of being much of a reader.’
Probably, May thought, she had just used Voyages of the Dolphin to make her code. If she wasn’t much of a reader, maybe there had been no other book conveniently to hand. Poor Doone. Whatever the truth had been, it didn’t make much difference now.
Hannah was looking at Aaron. His head was lolling in sleep.
‘I must go,’ May said quickly. Hannah came with her to the door. When they shook hands, Hannah’s felt tiny and light and brittle, like a claw. Then the door opened on to a gust of wind, which rattled the shadowy room. Rain slanted viciously beyond the porch.
‘I’ll run,’ May yelled and darted away into it. Exhilaration swept through her as the downpour plastered her hair to her head. She thrust the diary inside her sweatshirt and ran through the torrent, working her good shoulder forwards as if the wall of water were solid. Lightning stripped the darkness once more, and the bang and roll of the thunder
came instantly.
Lucas and Ivy were sitting on one of the sofas watching television, and John was at the kitchen end of the room, laying out food. ‘You’re soaked,’ he exclaimed when May burst into the room. He came at once to lift the wet hair from her neck and help her to peel off her sweatshirt.
She was still laughing. ‘It felt good, amazing. Not cold at all. You should see the lightning. Better than the Pittsharbor fireworks.’
When the diary was uncovered she put it aside. The black cover was smudged with damp, but it was otherwise undamaged. John rubbed her hair with a towel. She submitted to his attentions, luxuriously stretching her neck. Afterwards he hooked the feathery wings of hair behind her ears in a gesture implicit with tenderness. May closed her eyes briefly and bent her head until her forehead touched his shoulder. He cupped her skull with one hand, holding her against him. ‘Go and change the rest of your clothes,’ he ordered when he released her. As May slowly mounted the stairs the leaf and flower carvings of the banister felt voluptuously complicated under the palm of her hand.
When she came down again Ivy was in the kitchen stirring something in a pan on the cooker. Her earphones were firmly plugged in. ‘Dad’s gone out on the bluff for some fresh air,’ she called to May in a too-loud voice over the beat drumming inside her head.
Lucas was sitting forward on the sofa with his hands awkwardly dangling between his knees. He looked clumsy and, for once, uncomfortable with himself.
May went quickly and sat beside him. ‘I never thanked you for helping to look for me,’ she said. She had seen him, in the confusion of searchers who surrounded her after Spencer and Alexander had come up behind Marty. There had been no distinction to him then; none of the spotlit glow that had followed him all the summer. He had just been Lucas. Nor, May saw, was there any distinction now. He was good-looking, sun-tanned, ordinary. There was none of Marty’s silky threat in him … nothing to have enticed Doone beyond the point of reason. She didn’t know, now, how she could have imagined there was. But she did remember her own infatuation with him. It was a pale thing compared with Doone’s for Marty, but the memory of it made May certain in that instant that Marty hadn’t killed Doone. Doone had taken her own life, deliberately, in desperation.
‘It was so bad,’ Lucas confessed. ‘When you were lost. I would have done anything. Not just what I did do, which was only walking over the island a few times, you know?’
‘Thank you,’ May said awkwardly.
‘I didn’t want it to be like Doone. Not with you.’
‘I know. It wasn’t. I’m pretty glad about that myself.’
He didn’t give his high-voltage grin. Instead he glanced at Ivy and saw that her back was turned. ‘Uh, May, listen. I wanted to say I was sorry. Again, okay? About that time on Pittsharbor Night?’
‘It’s fine.’ May smiled at him. And at once she saw the infinitesimal change in his appraisal of her, as he reckoned with her smile, the way she tilted her head and the angle of her good arm on the cushions. Immediately she felt her own power as loud inside her as the beat of Ivy’s music, and Lucas reddened and stared down at his fidgeting hands.
Poor Doone, May thought. Wound up in the skeins of sadness that netted this place, never to break free of them. She was glad of her own escape, tomorrow. New York had never seemed so alluring. ‘Are you going to go on seeing Ivy?’
‘That’s kind of up to her.’ He shrugged. ‘Sure, I’d like to.’
You don’t stand a chance, May thought. Ivy spun round and the sisters grinned at each other.
‘We’re ready to eat,’ Ivy shouted. John came in from the deck, with rain shiny on the shoulders of his slicker, bringing cold air with him.
Lucas shuffled to his feet. ‘I better go.’
‘I’ll see you out,’ Ivy said. ‘Be at the Star Bar later?’
He waved at May, a mock-formal gesture that ended almost as a salute, and went on his way.
Once Lucas had gone, they sat down to eat. Ivy had laid three places close together at the top of the oversized oak table. They talked about the beach and Aaron, and about other holidays they had taken and might take in the future, and when she had eaten her tiny portion Ivy leant back and wound her sun-tanned arm through the slats of her chair back, continuing the conversation until May and John had finished too. Outside the rain slackened and turned to a soothing patter as the eye of the storm moved southwards.
Marty drove the unfamiliar car slowly down the coast road. It was a long thirty miles to the freeway in this direction. To his left were a dozen promontories, broken fingers of rock combing the spray from crashing waves, and on the other side dense swathes of conifers. The rain and the metronomic swish of the wipers, and the steady flicker of tree trunks in his headlamps, combined to make him overwhelmingly sleepy. He had slept hardly at all the night before, and very little the one before that. Thinking that music would help him to stay awake, he reached for the buttons of the radio, then remembered that it was a rental car and he would have to search the paperwork for the security code before he could make the thing work. He retracted his hand and stared ahead through the streaming rain.
The urge to let his eyes fall shut became irresistible. A yawn swelled in his throat and forced his jaws apart, and the tears it brought to his heavy eyes made him blink.
Some air, he must get some fresh air. He let down the window and a gust of salt-heavy wind drove rain into his face. He closed his eyes for a luxurious instant and clenched his hands on the wheel. The car strayed across the crown of the road.
The sea was very close. One of the inlets between the spines of rock must almost touch the road. He could hear the deep, insistent thunder of the waves driving into the confined space.
Marty opened his eyes and wrenched at the wheel to bring the car straight again. He pulled in to the side of the road, where dripping bushes swept the car wing, and switched off the engine. In the silence that followed a flash of lightning lit up the sky and sea. There was a ship under full sail, hardly a hundred yards off. He could see the pale canvas strain in the wind and the high bowsprit pitching against the seething water. His smarting eyes widened, stretching the orbits, and a snap of fear straightened his spine. He glanced into the driver’s mirror, but the road behind him was black and empty. When he looked again there was only the darkness, the sea invisibly booming into the rocky inlets, and the rain hammering on the roof of the car and needling his face through the open window. His retinas burned with the lightning flash and the image of the vessel etched with it.
Marty sat for a long time without moving, until his arms stiffened on the wheel and cold numbed his torso. Lightning flashed again, but there was no ship. No cars came by and in his solitude he felt as if he were the last man in the world.
At last he shook his head, as though he were trying to clear it of some persistent dream. He reached out with cold fingers and turned the ignition key. The engine fired and he eased the car slowly forward. Like an automaton, he drove on towards New York.
Sixteen
He descended the steps very slowly, placing one foot in front of the other with extreme deliberation. Every facet of the beach was grey in the early light: wet grey shingle, sullen water and long lines of breakers setting up a dull, continuous roar. Aaron reached the bottom of the steps and began to shuffle, leaning heavily on his stick. Gulls rose in an arc ahead of him, wheeling away from the storm debris at the high-water mark. He watched them as they soared against the clouded sky. His own progress was painful but still he lifted his head, a flicker of exhilaration within him fuelled by the scoured air. It was his beach, in all of its moods, but he loved it best when it was wild and inhospitable like this.
He had planned this morning’s expedition with great care, thinking of it as a break-out, and hoarding the energy and determination he knew he would need. Hannah couldn’t keep watch over him for ever and sure enough she had gone out to Pittsharbor for an hour to buy supplies. He was irritable that the slow traverse of the bluff and th
e steps was taking so long, but it was also illogical to be concerned about the time. He had made no arrangement, even though he might have picked up the telephone – that had never been his way – but he still nursed the hope that she would come, as she had done long ago.
The high-water mark was a tangle of wrack and line and shreds of garbage. He leaned on his stick to catch his breath, stirring the black fronds of weed with the toe of his boot. And when he looked up again she was walking to meet him. Her coat was wrapped about her and there was a scarf around her head. Sixty years had left her unmarked.
She reached his side. The surf was loud, but he heard her voice as clearly as if they had broken off their old conversation only an hour ago. ‘I was watching the beach,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I woke up this morning and I knew you’d be here.’
She had told him exactly the same at the very beginning, when she evaded her mother and came down to meet him between the fishing boats. There was a difference about the beach today, an iridescence in the light and a full-throated cadence to the sound of the sea, which reminded her of those days. She felt as light as a girl. They turned together and began to walk slowly along the crescent of the beach, just out of reach of the foam-lipped waves as they ran out into the shingle.
‘I am here,’ Aaron confirmed.
The Captain’s House and the Stiegels’ were closed and shuttered. He pointed up to them. ‘Gone back where they belong. You’ll be next, won’t you? You and Marian.’
She knew him so well. The distance of the years had telescoped, leaving only the mirage of time, which had ravaged their faces and seamed their skin. It was all a comedy, Elizabeth thought. She wanted to laugh, overtaken suddenly by the happiness of acceptance. There was nothing left for Aaron or for her to fight against. All their lives were embedded in the beach. They were no more than a comedy and an illusory ship, which seemed to carry the grains of tragedy away with it. Her eye was caught by the glimmer of a very small double shell lying among the pebbles. She stooped to retrieve it and examined the tiny gradations of rose-pink and pearl and silver. It was like a pair of baby’s fingernails. She held it in the palm of her hand, then tipped it gently back into the sea. All this she did while Aaron took a slow step and another.