harder.
‘Great,’ Ivy sighed. ‘Just great.’
She sat slumped in the seat beside her father, twisting her body away from him even though the seat-belt bit into her bare neck.
‘It’s only a summer storm.’
In the back seat May said nothing at all. She hadn’t spoken for more than an hour, since they had passed Bangor and turned towards the coast.
They had driven all the way up from New York, stopping for a night to stay with John’s sister. May was tired of the journey and of Ivy’s sulking, but even so she was not looking forward to their arrival at the beach house. Everything would be the same as it always was, except that it would go on being the same in a different place. How could a family vacation be anything of the kind if there wasn’t a family to live it; if there were only a father and two daughters who didn’t get on?
May leant her head against the window of the station-wagon and closed one eye, squinting so the smears of rain blurred and shimmered into rainbow fragments against the lights of the last houses on the road out of Pittsharbor.
Elizabeth Freshett Newton stood in the window of her house up on the bluff. This was the evening room, that was what her mother had called it. It faced north and west, away from the beach and the ocean, and overlooked part of the sheltered pocket of garden, which had once required the full-time efforts of a man and a boy to maintain in the English style favoured by her mother. Elizabeth’s parents had liked to entertain in the evening room, where blinds filtered the setting sun and brightened squares of pattern in the old rugs. She remembered bridge evenings, and impromptu piano recitals on the baby grand that still stood between the two tall windows. The memories of those parties of fifty years ago made the house seem the more empty and silent now.
The lamp at her shoulder shone on the window glass and made broken reflections in the wash of rain. Aware that her silhouette against the light would be visible to anyone outside, she reached up and clicked off the switch. There was no one out there to see her, of course, but she felt easier in the dark. Until the sudden crack of thunder came the only sounds were the measured ticking of the long-case clock and the rain. Her hand held the cord of the curtains, ready to draw them and close out the storm. Then she leant forward, peering into the dark. The headlights of a car were veering slowly along the road.
Elizabeth stood still. The beam of the lights came closer and swept across her windows, before turning towards the gateway of the Captain’s House. She heard the engine stop and through the drumming of the rain a car door slammed.
Another sheet of lightning ripped the sky. In its split-second eerie brilliance she saw a girl, running, with her shoulders hunched and one arm crooked over her bent head in an attempt to shield herself from the storm. The flash froze her into immobility and left the image burning behind Elizabeth’s eyes.
The thunder crashed again. Elizabeth’s hand had flown up to her mouth, but as the darkness resettled she let it drop. She waited for her heart to stop pounding with shock.
It wasn’t the same girl.
It was someone else, just another girl of a similar age and build. The Bennisons had rented the old house out for the season and these were the summer tenants, that was all.
Two or three years ago Sam Bennison had laid out fancy garden lighting along the path to the Captain’s House and now these little flares suddenly shone out, lighting up sopping-wet billows of overgrown foliage. The back door of the house stood open and two girls were trailing mournfully back to the car, their hair already draggled and soaking. The lights picked out their T-shirts and denimed legs and big white sneakers. A man gave each of them an armful of luggage from the open back of the station-wagon and they trooped back to the house.
The younger girl was indeed in her early teens, just like Doone. She was stocky, too, with the same shoulder-length hair. Otherwise, Elizabeth now saw, there was no real resemblance.
She turned away from the window, leaving the curtains open.
May dumped her bag on the bed in the bedroom Ivy had not chosen. Then she sat down beside it and looked around her.
The bedhead was made of curly wrought iron, kind of French-looking, May thought, although she had no idea what a French bed might really look like. There was a pine bureau with a framed mirror screwed to the wall above it, an armchair with a worn slipcover and a set of bare shelves. Beside the bed lay a blue and grey rag rug hiding, as she saw when she pushed it aside with her foot, a burn mark in the haircord carpeting. The walls were wood panelled and painted a greyish white that reminded her of a bird’s egg. There were sticky-tape marks on the panelling showing where someone else’s pictures had once been fixed.
Except for the faintly exotic bed, the room looked what it was – a bare shell in a beach house, stripped ready for a summer’s rental. A smell of dust and salt was trapped inside the closed windows.
But there was also a forlornness about it, which went beyond mere emptiness. It made May shiver. Or maybe she was cold because her hair and T-shirt were wet from the rainstorm. She hugged herself and tried with numb fingers to rub some warmth into her arms.
Ivy pushed open May’s door with the toe of her sneaker. She came in without waiting to be asked and leant against the door frame. ‘You going to sit there all night?’
May shrugged.
Her sister sighed and her pretty top lip lifted. Once, at school, May had heard an older girl describing Ivy. ‘She’s drop-dead gorgeous, of course,’ the girl had whispered in what had seemed a knowing, adult way. Ivy was just eighteen and May fourteen. She supposed that Ivy was gorgeous, if you went for that sort of thing. She also knew that she herself was anything but.
Ivy said in her condescending way, ‘Look. We’re here, aren’t we? Can’t you try and be half-way happy about it?’
‘Yeah, all right. I notice you’ve been Miss Sunshine since we left home.’ And without waiting for Ivy to answer she got up and went to the window. After a small struggle she pushed up the sash and leant her elbows on the sill. Needle points of rain drove into her face, but the storm was already passing. Patches of faintly paler sky showed in places through the ragged masses of cloud.
‘Dad’s sending out for pizza,’ Ivy said to her sister’s back.
‘I don’t want any.’
‘Why not? Are you on another of your diets?’
‘Is that any of your business?’
‘Jesus. Suit yourself,’ Ivy snapped. She went away, slamming the door.
Left alone again, May moved slowly around the room. Lightly, with the tips of her fingers, she touched the exuberant metal curves of the bedhead, and the empty bookshelf, and the faintly splintery grooves of the panelling next to the bed, then circled with her forefinger and thumb the worn knob of one of the bureau drawers. There was a distant, fluctuating, deep-throated sound, which she only now identified as waves breaking on the beach.
The sad room seemed to enclose her, embedding her within itself in a way that was almost comforting. She sank down again on the bed. Sitting motionless, with her arms hanging between her parted knees, she let her mind wander.
‘May? Can you hear me?’
She became aware that her father had been calling from downstairs for some time.
