instant, whether by design or coincidence, a bank of black clouds swallowed up the sun.
14.
WHEN IT COMES to bridge, the punishment for ignorance is apparently banishment, which suited me well enough. For a short while, I hung around the well-appointed drawing room, holding my iced tea, watching the rain shatter violently against the French windows while the Monks, unconcerned, set up the bridge table. Lucky for them—or again, maybe by design—there were two other guests, a mother and daughter, who made up the other sides. They were the Huxleys, Mrs. Huxley and her daughter, Livy, and Isobel explained that it was Dr. Huxley, husband and father of same, who had come to Popeye’s rescue in the Fisher kitchen yesterday. We exchanged the usual bland pleasantries. Livy and her mother were perfectly nice, perfectly pretty, like two round, full scoops of vanilla ice cream, the younger one wearing a dress like a lemon meringue. I remember thinking, at the time, how utterly harmless they seemed, how absent of tooth and claw. Clay had disappeared somewhere with his father. Isobel had mixed herself a drink from the liquor cabinet and now sat in her bridge chair, next to Mrs. Monk, wearing an expression of sharklike intensity.
When the rain died away to a drizzle, I called over my shoulder that I was going for a walk to see the cliffs and I slipped through one of the French doors to the bluestone terrace and the lawn beyond. The wet grass soaked my shoes and stockings. When I reached the cliff’s edge, I took them off and laid the stockings to dry across a large, white rock, and then I sat down on a neighboring rock and watched the clouds storm angrily away to the northeast. The cliffs weren’t especially high, maybe forty or fifty feet, but they were steep and rugged, and the path snaked carefully down the least forbidding side to end in a pale beach. Out to sea, a lone sailboat picked its way along the coast, about a hundred yards from shore.
Now that the sun shone unobstructed, the heat built once more, sinking into my skin and bones and the rough surface of the rock beneath me. I removed my jacket—I’d left my hat and gloves indoors—and thought I should really find some shade, before I burned. But I didn’t want to move. There was just enough breeze to make it bearable. The air was rich and damp with the smell of the sea, and there was something hypnotic about the movements of that lone, brave sailboat, something graceful and eternal. I could just make out the man who sat in the stern, next to the tiller. He had dark hair that flashed from time to time against the white of the triangular sail, and at some point, as I watched, I began to realize that the sailor was Joseph. Or maybe I was only hoping it was Joseph? Maybe it was just longing.
I straightened and squinted, and as if he felt my scrutiny, the sailor turned his head toward shore.
Joseph.
I raised my hand and waved, even though he couldn’t possibly recognize me from there, not sitting as I was on the opposite corner of the Island from the house where I was supposed to be sitting. Up went Joseph’s arm, returning the wave, and then he rose from his seat at the tiller and reached for a rope. A sheet—wasn’t that what they called ropes on boats? Sort of confusing, if you asked me, because something you called a sheet ought logically to be a sail. Whatever it was, Joseph did something to it, adjusting its pitch against the wind. When he turned back, his arm lifted again, in such a way that he seemed to be beckoning me toward the water.
I stood and glanced at my shoes and stockings, drying on the nearby rock. I glanced at the path, snaking its way to the beach below. My skin was flushed and damp, my skirt creased, my blouse stained with perspiration. The salt breeze tumbled my hair.
“Miranda. There you are.”
I pitched forward. Clayton’s arm shot out to catch me.
“Careful!” he said.
“Sorry! I didn’t hear you come up.”
“No need to apologize. Shouldn’t have snuck up like that. Gosh, who’s that crazy fellow out there?”
“Just some sailboat,” I said.
“He’s not afraid of a little squall, I guess.” Clay stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. He’d taken off his jacket and stood there in his shirtsleeves, rolled halfway up his forearms. A considerable concession to the heat, for a man like him. He rolled onto his toes and back down again. “Say. Do you have a moment, Miranda?” he asked.
“Sure I do.”
“Can we sit?”
I took the larger rock, next to my shoes and stockings, while Clay propped himself on the smaller one and crossed his legs at the ankles. His feet looked hot and uncomfortable, encased in brown argyle socks and leather shoes. I tucked my bare white toes against the rock and said, “Anything in particular?”
“Actually,” he said, as if the idea had just occurred to him, “I wanted to ask you about Izzy.”
“What about Izzy?”
He uncrossed his ankles and crossed them again, putting the other foot on top. His hands twiddled together against his thighs. “That was some party, yesterday, wasn’t it? A big day for you both. A happy day. We’re all—well, we couldn’t be happier for Mr. Fisher. Your mother’s everything we might have hoped for in a—a new mother for Izzy.”
“She’s already got a mother, hasn’t she?”
“Well, of course that depends on whom you ask. I don’t like to speak ill of people. You haven’t met her, have you? The ex Mrs. Fisher?”
“No.”
“I don’t suppose there’s any reason you should. She lives in … is it Nice? Somewhere in the south of France, I understand. She remarried a few years ago, some old French aristocrat she met during the war. Lost all his dough, I guess, and wanted hers. They say he’s a—well …”
“A what?”
“Nothing. Nothing you need to know about. Let’s just say they both go their own ways, the two of them. That’s what I hear, anyway.”
“Then why did they marry?”
“People marry for all kinds of reasons, Miranda. I don’t know, maybe she wanted the title. She’s a funny old bird. Always was. Restless, you know, wanted to go abroad all the time, spend her time with that international set—you know who I mean—instead of summering on the Island.”
At the time, I didn’t know whom he meant. Clay pronounced the words international set with distaste, as if it were some disease that had no cure, but to me it sounded exotic and wonderful. So I said innocently, “What’s wrong with that? I’d like to go abroad.”
“I mean make a habit of it. Socialize with those people, artists and aristocrats and hangers-on, new money, all the time having affairs and divorcing and God knows what else. Anyway, she’s never shown much interest in poor Izzy, even when she was a baby. So I think we were all hoping—when we heard the news—and then we met you and your mother—”
“Maybe she’d be an improvement?”
He nodded vigorously. “Oh, she is. I mean, you’ve got to be careful what you say, because Mrs. Fisher—the former Mrs. Fisher, I mean, the Countess whatever she is now—her family still summers here. The Dumonts?” The end of the sentence turned up inquisitively, as if there were some kind of chance I knew the Dumonts personally.
“I’ve
