Moon Island

by Rosie Thomas

  Elizabeth reversed away from the snow bank and began the drive in convoy through deserted streets towards the bluff road. The tolling bell faded behind them.

  ‘Did he always intend to go in the winter, when the place belongs to its rightful owners?’ Marian asked, breaking the silence between them. ‘Did you know how much he hated us summer complaints? He wouldn’t have wanted a crowd of them gaping over the fence at his funeral, would he?’ She kept her big face turned away, to examine this dignified version of Pittsharbor, which did not entice with tourist shops or jostle with visitors. Her eyes were puffy, and her cheeks and lips looked raw.

  Elizabeth’s gloved hands rested lightly on the wheel. Her face was powdered, expressionless. She had kept the same neutral demeanour all through the service. ‘I don’t know about intended. But Aaron always knew what he wanted,’ she answered.

  They left the ice-banded expanse of the harbour behind them and turned towards the bluff road.

  ‘He didn’t always get it, did he?’ Marian still didn’t turn her head. Her hair was drawn back and pinned in a new, flattened way that made her look older. ‘He spent his life without you.’

  The statement dropped between them, then faded like the church bell.

  Elizabeth drew her colourless lower lip between her teeth, but she said nothing. Her eyes remained fixed on the road.

  ‘Didn’t you know I knew? Oh, he told me. Aaron and I were lovers too, of a kind. When we used to take our afternoons of middle age on the pine needles up in the woods he told me about his first and only love. Didn’t he ever confide in you about me and him, Elizabeth? No? Let me tell you why. It was because I was a diversion – and not the only one, of course – a distraction along the route of a life that hadn’t led where he wanted it to. We had sex, probably because sex wasn’t Hannah’s thing. I wasn’t important enough to tell about.’

  Elizabeth took Marian’s declaration and considered it. The substance of it hardly disturbed her. She was thinking, We’re two old women dressed in black, driving away from a graveside. We’ve buried the man and we won’t ever learn the differences in what he meant for each of us. And as for the similarities – the old rhythms are the same everywhere. She didn’t think keeping or breaking silence, or even the totems of pride itself, mattered very much any more. But she did feel an affinity with her companion that she had never known before. ‘You sound bitter, Marian.’

  Their eyes met briefly now. Marian’s were embedded in swollen flesh and Elizabeth recoiled from this evidence of the other woman’s feelings. She returned her attention to the road and the rear of Chorlton Deevey’s pick-up truck. They travelled in silence for a minute. Ahead Elizabeth could see the white-layered shack that in the summer became the Flying Fish.

  ‘You think it’s bitterness? You won’t allow me the privilege of plain grief? If you lose someone you never truly had – and Aaron was never mine even though I loved him dearly – you suffer the loss twice over.’ The five houses came into view. They rose out of a snow-sea that washed over the empty headland, seeming to ride on it to nowhere with the oyster-white sky as a sail. ‘Twice over,’ she repeated. Marian never could resist an effect.

  Elizabeth lifted one hand in its black suede glove and placed it over Marian’s. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said gently. ‘I didn’t understand.’

  The end house was filled with people. Angela Fennymore had arranged a funeral buffet and there was a ham at the centre of a white-clothed table, shored up with baskets of rolls, and dishes of pickles and relish. Hannah stood at one end of the room with her son, shaking hands with the people as they arrived and gravely accepting their condolences. Her grandchildren huddled in embarrassed discomfort in the furthest corner. One of the boys bore a strong resemblance to Aaron.

  Marian and Elizabeth took Hannah’s hand in turn.

  ‘Marian, Elizabeth. I’m glad to see you both today. I know Aaron would have wanted it.’ Her eyes were bright and her narrow back was straight. She looked as if she had been offered a glimpse of a different and better existence.

  Glasses of sweet wine or whiskey were handed round on a tray by the second daughter and when everyone held a drink Doug Hanscom stepped into the middle of the room. He was wearing a dark coat and a rusty black necktie seemed knotted too tightly around his shirt collar. He had big, red, sea-scarred hands, which he held folded in front of him. Elizabeth thought of his lobster boat cutting the harbour water the summer before last and the waterlogged weight he had knotted to the end of his line.

  He cleared his throat and the low rustle of talk died away. ‘Neighbours and old friends,’ Doug began, looking around the circle of attentive faces. He took his time, measuring the proper weight of his words. ‘Aaron was a Pittsharbor man. He lived here all his life and he loved the place. He worked hard, never was afraid of a day’s work. He married locally and he built this house with his own hands, to bring his wife and family to. He lived a decent life. Hannah and he brought up their children to be respectable folk like themselves and they were proud of them.’

  Hannah stood at his side, her eyes fixed on the window and the iron mouth of the bay beyond it.

  ‘He was a part of this town. We all knew him and what he stood for. Today we put him to rest in the Pittsharbor graveyard. I can think of no better ending. And no better life to be remembered by.’

  There was a murmur of assent and a respectful lifting of glasses.

  The widow raised her head. She was as neat and proper and unrevealing as a starched handkerchief, just as she always had been. ‘Thank you, Doug. I’m grateful for your kindness and for the help that all of you have given me in my loss. I am blessed with my children and grandchildren, and I am lucky in my life here in Pittsharbor.’ The little speech was an ordeal for her. She stepped back to her daughter’s protection, who signalled that they should all move on to help themselves to food.

  Elizabeth sat down on an upright sofa. The tributes had been moving, perhaps just because they had omitted so much more than they stated. It was a version of a life, she thought, and of the person. A decent version, which gave no inkling of the pained and painful man she had loved.

  Marian eased her bulk down beside her. ‘I’m glad I don’t have to live here all the time,’ she muttered. ‘The introversion of it. The narrowness of mind.’

  ‘It wouldn’t suit either of us.’

  They had made their decisions long ago, for better or worse.

  The ham was carved and plates passed round. The room grew stuffy with the heat of the stove and the pressure of people enclosed in a small space. The noise of talk swelled and there were one or two subdued coughs of laughter. Hannah moved among the groups, and at last came to Marian and Elizabeth. Caught between the two of them, Elizabeth was reminded of a photograph that Marty Stiegel had taken last year. The three old women of the beach, unwillingly connected, three faces of the same episode.

  Sarah Corder had sailed out of the bay in her whaling ship and now Aaron was dead.

  She felt calm descend and wrap itself around her. There were many different kinds of fulfilment, she thought. She had achieved her modest version of it.

  Marian was asking busily, ‘What will you do now, Hannah? Sell up and move somewhere comfortable?’

  The other woman’s sharp face grew needle points. ‘I’ll be staying put. It’s where I belong.’

  ‘And I always thought you toughed it out up here all winter because that was what Aaron wanted.’

  The arrowtips of Hannah’s features suddenly glinted. ‘It will be what I want from now on.’ It would, of course. Hannah too had won a version of freedom for herself

  ‘How will you keep yourself busy? With none of your grandchildren close by?’

  Elizabeth flinched. Marian was intolerable. But Hannah answered her straight. ‘I’ll set down to my books with no one to criticise me. I might write a bit of a history of the bay and the island. In my own time, with my own ideas.’

  The rough shelves of books rose behind her, old bro
wn volumes interspersed with modern editions of local history and fiction. Doone’s two books were buried among them. On another shelf at the end were folders from Write it Down, the stationery shop on Sunday Street.

  ‘I think that’s a very good idea,’ Elizabeth told her.

  ‘Why, thank you,’ Hannah returned.

  The funeral gathering was breaking up. Edie Clark and her husband were already standing at the door with their outer coats on. Outside the sky was darkening from oyster to slate and the clouds were gravid with yet more snow.

  Hannah hitched her chin towards the side window. Behind a loop of felt curtain an angle of the bay and the land that backed it were just visible. ‘What about that, out there?’ she demanded.

  Spencer was in Boston. He had a private view scheduled at the gallery that evening. Two or three of Judith Stiegel’s new, small and fierce pieces of work were included. Spencer was very taken with them. He was too busy to travel down east for Aaron’s funeral. The Stiegels were back together again, he had told Elizabeth.

  ‘The land?’

  ‘I won’t sell. Don’t ask me. I know it’s your money that wants to buy it.’

  Elizabeth smoothed the black skin of her gloves over her fingers. She felt a shaft of wicked cold at her back as someone opened the door on to the porch. ‘I promised Aaron, the last time we spoke. But after I am gone, the money will be Spencer’s.’

  Hannah’s mouth folded. ‘None of us will be here for ever.’ It was only an episode, all of it. Only a brief episode. ‘Now, excuse me. I must see his friends out.’

  Marian sniffed hard. ‘Put up an apartment block and a couple of parking lots just to show her, I would.’

  Elizabeth smiled at her.

  She didn’t stay much longer. She spoke to a handful of Pittsharbor neighbours, then kissed Hannah goodbye on each of her stiff cheeks. She followed Chorlton Deevey and his wife out of the porch door and began the walk towards her car. But on a sudden impulse she slipped aside and skirted the side of the house. The snow was deep and it ruffed the tops of her boots, but she pushed on through it, under the icicled eaves, to the seaward side of the house. She crossed the bluff to the beach steps, not caring in the least that Aaron’s family and the last of the guests would see her, a jerky black figure moving like a marionette against the weighty sky.

  The wooden steps were hummocked with unmarked snow. Elizabeth trod through it carefully, the snap of each unbroken crust loud in her ears. In her pocket was a note that had arrived at her house in Boston, from John Duhane. He had told her that both his girls were well, that Ivy was enjoying college and May now had a boyfriend. And he asked her to forward the enclosed envelope to Leonie Beam, whose present address he believed she knew. Elizabeth had done as he asked.

  As she walked, all the histories and the as yet untold stories of the beach and the island seemed to swell and sink around her, like the endless sea. She hoped with an old woman’s dry clarity that Leonie and John would avoid the mistakes she had made. She remembered the meetings with Aaron, long ago, and the last time she had seen him, in almost this very spot. The years seemed briefly to dissolve and coalesce, so that Sarah Corder and her captain were part of the present, and Aaron and she and Marian, and John and Leonie and May, and all their loves and failures were no more than episodes played out against the shifting of the tides. Elizabeth found some comfort in this diminishment.

  The tide was rising, the swell of the waves cracking beneath a tentative crust of ice. She moved slowly around the arc of shingle in the direction of her own steps, her face stinging and her body whipped by the wind. The stones were capped by pillows of snow and ice crystals bitterly ringed the craters between them. In the middle of the hostile beach she stopped and looked upwards. The roofs and chimneys loomed against the sky, and as she wept for Aaron the first black specks of snow whirled into her blinded eyes.

  Across the bay, on the ice-bound wilderness of Moon Island, snow also fell on the low mound that had once been an unmarked grave.

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  Available 27 Feb 2014

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  Newlywed Nerys Watkins leaves rural Wales for the first time to accompany her husband on a missionary posting to India. Deep in the exquisite heart of Kashmir lies the lakeside city of Srinagar, where the British live on carved wooden houseboats and dance, flirt and gossip as if there is no war.

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  About the Author

  Rosie Thomas is the author of a number of celebrated novels, including the bestselling The Kashmir Shawl. A keen adventurer, she has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, competed in the Peking to Paris car rally, trekked in the footsteps of Shackleton in South Georgia, and travelled in Ladakh and Kashmir. She lives in London.

  Also by Rosie Thomas

  Celebration

  Follies

  Sunrise

  The White Dove

  Strangers

  Bad Girls, Good Women

  A Woman of Our Times

  All My Sins Remembered

  Other People’s Marriages

  A Simple Life

  Every Woman Knows a Secret

  Moon Island

  White

  The Potter’s House

  If My Father Loved Me

  Sun At Midnight

  Iris and Ruby

  Constance

  Lovers and Newcomers

  The Kashmir Shawl

  The Illusionists

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

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  First published in the United Kingdom by William Heinemann in 1998

  Copyright © Rosie Thomas 1998

  Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers 2014

  Cover images © Shutterstock.com

  Rosie Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exc
lusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Ebook Edition © FEB 2014 ISBN: 9780007560608

  Version: [2014-02-13]

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