As interested as Doone ever was in anything, that is. There are some old stories, you know. I don’t know if she ever read the books in the end.’
May nodded. ‘Thanks. Look, I’d better go. My dad’ll be wondering where I am.’ Perhaps, she thought. Or perhaps not.
Aaron levered himself painfully to his feet to accompany her to the door, although she wished he would not. Outside again beneath the shade of the tree he said, ‘I’m too old to remember why young women cry. I remember enough tears, but I’ve forgotten most of what stirred them up. You forget nearly all of it, however bad it seems at the time. You learn to live. That may not seem much of a comfort to you right now.’
May shifted her weight. She did not want to talk to Aaron Fennymore about any of this, although it was true he was only trying to be comforting. ‘It’s nothing. It’s just me.’
‘I told Doone the same thing. She didn’t believe me either.’
‘Was she unhappy?’
It was not the kind of question, she understood, which Aaron was interested in answering. ‘You know what happened.’
‘But wasn’t it an accident that she drowned?’
At length Aaron replied, ‘Yes. That was the verdict.’
Curiosity and a chill, queasy premonition crawled together up May’s spine. She wanted to know and feared the discovery, whatever it might be. She persisted, ‘Do you mean that the truth is different from the official story?’
To her surprise Aaron walked a little way away from her and stood staring past the house to a thin segment of the sea. When he turned his head again he spoke quietly, so that she had to inch forward to catch the words. ‘It’s more that there are always layers of truth. Some aspects of the truth you can measure and explain, and others defy you to do anything but accept them for what they are. I haven’t known so many other places that I can compare, but I believe the Beach is particularly resistant to rational explanation.’
May thought, I know that. I knew it as soon as we came here. Before I even knew about Doone.
She didn’t want to ask any more. There was enough to absorb already. ‘Thank you for lending me the books.’ They were tucked under her arm.
‘They belong to my wife. As for the girl, you’re not like her,’ Aaron said, as if that settled their conversation. He waved his stick in dismissal and hobbled back towards the house. May wandered slowly along the lane to the dark full stop of the Captain’s House.
Traffic in the main street of Pittsharbor was almost at a standstill with jeeps and RVs and station-wagons tailing back from the lights. Cyclists threaded between the cars and a steady stream of pedestrians flowed between the shops and the open-air vegetable and fish market. At the stall that Leonie knew always had the best fish John debated with the young stallholder, then bought a sweet, silvery chunk of tuna. She watched him, with her own shopping piled in her arms, as he took the neat paper package and stowed it in his bag.
Tom always did the food marketing swiftly and as if it was a test of his professionalism, prodding and irritably rejecting any merchandise that didn’t please him, and adopting a triumphant air when he brought his kill back home to the lair. By contrast, John seemed to take a mild and uncompetitive pleasure in wandering between the baskets of muddy lettuces and pyramids of melons, settling on his purchases apparently by whim instead of iron rules of quality and value. Leonie found this refreshing.
When they had finished they hesitated beside the road, watching the tailback of traffic.
‘Thanks for the ride,’ Leonie said. ‘Looks like I’ve brought you into town at just the wrong moment.’
After May’s exit Leonie had told John she must do some shopping. It was true: Tom had gone back to Boston to undertake the battle with his chef, otherwise the job would not have been delegated to her, but Marian had handed her a list that morning. Everyone else was busy with children or watersports.
John had said at once, ‘I’ll drive you. I’ve got some stuff to get, too.’
Now he turned his back on the glittering lines of cars and looked down at her. ‘I think we should have lunch.’
Leonie thought for a moment. She had the impression that there were unspoken negotiations taking place within this bland exchange. The realisation made heat prickle beneath her hairline and the picturesque and fully restored old façades of Main Street took on a more highly coloured focus. ‘What about all this shopping?’ she asked. Of course, Tom would never have left fresh fish broiling in the afternoon sun in the back of a car.
By way of answer John went back to the fish stall and returned with a bag full of ice. They bedded their purchases beneath it in the trunk of the station-wagon. Then he led the way to Sandy’s Bar, the best place to eat in Pittsharbor but no longer patronised by the Beams because Tom had had a disagreement with the proprietor the summer before. It gave Leonie an agreeable feeling of disloyalty to settle herself with John in a corner booth draped with fishing nets and studded with shells.
It was cool in Sandy’s; she pushed her damp hair off her face and eased the armholes of her cotton vest where they cut into her armpits. She was conscious of John watching these small movements; it felt like a long time since a man had watched her in just this way, but she accepted his gaze, letting it lie on her skin like warm honey.
With Tom there would have been critical deliberations over the menu, but now she chose food and drink at random. They were talking about their lives, filling in details that needed establishing before they moved on. She learned that John ran his own business mail delivery service. It was a successful company, but he found the demands of it difficult to balance against the need to take care of Ivy and May. In her turn Leonie described her work as an editor for an art and art-history publisher in Boston. She told him about the economics of high-quality colour printing and her plans to commission a series of monographs on women artists of the twentieth century. A plate of griddled shrimp with a hot Thai sauce was put in front of her and she blinked in surprise, having forgotten what she had ordered.
The talk threaded between them like a line of stitches. After the first connecting seam was made they felt free to change direction. Leonie said suddenly, ‘I’m not comfortable in that beach house, but just the same, Tom always wants us to spend the summer vacation up here. Marian makes me feel that I deliberately don’t conform. That I must be denying her more grandchildren on a whim.’
‘Hasn’t she got enough already? What about the population crisis?’ Their eyes met, testing the strength of the seam. ‘Doesn’t she know you can’t conceive?’
‘Of course she does. But perhaps if I just tried harder. Babies were so easy for her, and for Anne and Shelly and Gina. They’re the other daughters-in-law. Even Karyn, who didn’t manage to get much else right before that, cruised it.’
Looking down at her food Leonie thought of the hospitals; the tubes and the needles and the drugs and the waiting, and the increasingly desperate connections with Tom that had led them there. Tom had become angry with her, that was what had happened. She didn’t blame him for his anger, just for the form it had taken. He had retreated from her, and left her marooned on her island of sterility.
‘Is it difficult to talk about it?’
‘Only in the sense that there isn’t anything to say any longer.’
The
