‘Let the boys do it. Tom will walk you home, Elizabeth.’
‘Aaron has aged ten years since last summer,’ Karyn said, after they had all gone. ‘It’s quite a tribute to your new friend, Mom, that they came to meet him. I wonder if he realised it?’
‘Why should he?’ Leonie demanded, too sharply. When they looked at her in surprise she added, ‘I mean, understand all the social and historical nuances that rule this place? It takes years to figure exactly where the Fennymores stand in relation to the Newtons, who said or did what to whom twenty years ago. John Duhane’s only just got here.’
Marian smiled at her. ‘You are very good at it yourself, Leonie. You humour us.’
Leonie lifted a bunch of dirty wineglasses on to a tray. ‘When do the Stiegels get here?’ she asked.
Elliot took it from her. ‘I bumped into Marty and Judith at a gallery opening in SoHo,’ he said. ‘They’ll be arriving in a week.’
‘Great,’ Leonie said. Although they had rented the fifth house for several years the Stiegels were outsiders too. Like John Duhane. And herself.
The younger boys brought driftwood from the ends of the stony beach, and Lucas and one of his friends knelt by the fire and fed it. The flames fanned upwards, washing their faces with lurid light. Ivy and Gail reclined on the rocks. Their long legs folded on either side of the other friend, flirtatiously penning him in. The three of them watched the fire, smoked and murmured and joked together. Lucas had brought beer in his boat, and from time to time one of them lazily tipped a can and gulped from it.
May sat apart. When Kevin and Joel were tired of collecting wood they squatted head to head and produced cigarette papers and a packet of weed wrapped in tinfoil. They offered her a draw from the resulting roll-up but she shook her head, wishing at the same time she had accepted and could melt into the group as easily as Ivy had done. It was cold at this distance from the fire, so she edged a few inches closer, feeling the meaty weight of her buttocks as she slithered a trough across the sand.
Lucas was kneeling, staring into the fire. A pale slice of hair had worked itself loose from the rubber band that held it and fell forward, bisecting his face.
May gazed at him.
To one side of her Joel coughed as he inhaled, then snorted with laughter. In her flat, slightly nasal voice Gail called for another beer.
‘What’s happening, then?’
Lucas shrugged in answer to Joel. From his place between Gail and Ivy the other boy said, ‘I’ve got a couple of ideas. How about this for a start?’ He rolled over and flopped on top of Gail, pushing his knee between hers.
Lucas briefly glanced over his shoulder at Ivy. To May he said, ‘You okay there?’ She nodded, unable to speak. The metal braces on her teeth felt like a gag. ‘How old are you anyway?’
‘Fourteen,’ she managed. She kept her lips folded down over her teeth.
‘Yeah. Well, Kevin’s fifteen and Joel’s sixteen. Not that much difference.’
From their snuffles of laughter it was plain that his brothers thought otherwise.
‘What’s with these names?’ Lucas’s friend asked. ‘I mean, Ivy and May?’
It was Ivy he was looking at but May said loudly, ‘Our mother was English, she chose them. She said they were Victorian housemaid’s names.’ She remembered the day when they talked about it.
They had been in the kitchen, the three of them, the one in the old apartment, so she must have been still small, perhaps five or six. They were baking. Ivy was running the bendy plastic blade around the mixing bowl, scraping up a pale creamy ruff of coconut cake mix, ready for licking.
Alison bent over to peer inside the oven, at the first batch of cakes. She straightened up and her face looked shiny from the heat. ‘They are English names,’ she said in her definite way that made you know whatever she said was right. ‘Old-fashioned names, not modern trendy ones like Zoe or Cassie.’ Victorian housemaids. ‘They’ll come back in style one day, you’ll see.’ May had felt proud of her name and distinguished by it.
She saw that everyone was laughing at her. Kevin and Joel had collapsed sideways in a heap and Gail and the two other boys were grinning, showing their big teeth. Ivy was glaring in fury.
Lucas stretched out a foot and stirred the logs with the toe of his boot. ‘Ivy and May,’ he mused. ‘I think they’re cute names, your mom was quite right.’
May looked at him again. The wedge of hair had fallen loose and now he pushed it back with a flat hand. The firelight neatly divided the planes of his face, light and shadow, rose and umber. Gratitude hammered in her chest, and as he turned his head their eyes briefly met and held.
In that single second May fell in love.
Adoration and devotion seeded themselves and flowered, and overwhelmed her with their cloudy scent. She felt dizzy and elated even as she watched his attention leave her and return to the fire. She didn’t care any longer what the others thought. Lucas had defended her. The island and Pittsharbor and the world itself were bearable, even beautiful, because they held Lucas. The music of amazement and awe hummed in her ears.
Lucas scrambled up and sauntered over to sit down next to Ivy. She made room for him, curving her leg so that her hip tightened in the little skirt. Lucas put his big hand there.
Humbly May ducked her head. The moment was already forgotten, it had meant nothing to any of the others. With the tip of one fingernail she scratched minutely in the sand. Lucas, she wrote, the letters engraved on top of each other so no one could see.
Later, Lucas and Ivy strolled away from the fire. With her chin resting on her knees May watched them. As they crunched to the end of the little beach Ivy curved her pliant body inwards so that her thigh and hip and shoulder touched his. Lucas’s arm rested lightly around her waist.
Kevin and Joel tried to talk to May but she couldn’t listen. She kept saying what? or nodding her head and in the end they gave up.
After what seemed like a long time May stood up. Ivy and Lucas had climbed beyond the beach and vanished into the scrubby trees. She dragged a log to the fire and dumped it on, raising a cloud of powdery sparks. Then she slipped off from the others. She wanted to get away from Kevin and Joel and their monotonous stoned giggling, and from the two other boys tussling over Gail. Perhaps she would stumble across Ivy and Lucas. If she interrupted what they were doing, Ivy wouldn’t be able to have him all to herself.
The darkness in the shelter of the spruce trees was intense. May stood still, widening her eyes in an effort to see ahead. A path revealed itself as a just discernible glimmer of paler ground and she ducked forwards, her breath growing loud in her ears. The ground rose steeply and a claw of undergrowth ripped her calf as she climbed. When she stopped to take her bearings the silence was absolute: solid, it lay like a suffocating coat over her skin, pressing down against her lips and eyelids. She rubbed her bare forearms and felt the fine hairs prickle under her fingertips. She was breathing in little irregular gasps.
May sat down suddenly on a broken tree stump that was furred with moss. The silence swelled, rushing away from her at a speed that made her dizzy, then became a vast shell containing tiny noises – the rustle of
