gone to the house to tell Jennifer and Sam.’
The two women had put their arms around one another, Elizabeth wordlessly grateful that Leonie was there.
‘We should speak to Marty Stiegel again.’ The silence was broken by Marian, of course. She scribbled another line and Elizabeth reached out to her coffee pot, lifted it with an effort and refilled Hannah’s cup. This annual enforced contact was always difficult. Marian was a vulgarian and Hannah a provincial mouse, but a silently critical one, always appearing to judge and find wanting. Yet, Elizabeth reminded herself in her mother’s voice, the job had to be done, whether she enjoyed it or not, because she had undertaken it.
The previous year, Marty had brought along a gas barbecue and had made wild blueberry pancakes for all comers. It had been the success of the stall.
‘I’m sure he’ll help out again,’ Hannah judged.
‘They do have the baby this year.’
‘Marian, it’s only a couple of hours we’re asking for,’ Elizabeth said.
They wouldn’t show their dislike too plainly, any of the three of them. It was muffled about with coffee and china cups and decorous arrangements for the bake stall. Elizabeth looked at Hannah’s pursed mouth and sharp eyes half veiled with pink lids, and thought of the years they had known each other, since they were both young women, all the years that had been pressed into shadowy negative images by no one admitting to their real feelings. Owning to nothing had kept Elizabeth away from Pittsharbor and the beloved bay, and the spellbound heart of the island itself, for the whole of her married life.
Impatience with lists of ingredients and estimations of plates and forks needed, and calculations of charges and change crawled down her spine. It was an imposition to be old and look back on an unfulfilled life. Her memories bore a patina like clouded pewter, without colours or depth. Elizabeth wished she were young again and tasting the luxury of choice, with a passion that made her fingers tremble around the shell of her bone-china cup. And as she gazed downwards she was reproached by the sight of her own hands, age-blotched as they were and roped with sinews.
‘Do you agree, Elizabeth?’
It was Marian demanding and she hadn’t heard the question.
Marian was a bully. Elizabeth felt sorry for her children and their partners, and the grandchildren, driven into acquiescence by an overbearing old woman. Or was it better to be dominating in just the way that Marian was, rather than an accumulation of shadows, a prim negative, like herself? ‘I didn’t hear what you said.’ And she added with a certain satisfaction, ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.’
Marian’s tongue clicked. She repeated the question, which was to do with limiting the order of blueberry pancakes to one per customer because last year the line had wound all around the stall and caused a crowd, and in the thick of it some of the kids had pinched muffins off the dish at the front.
‘I don’t believe it matters a dab,’ Elizabeth sighed at the end of it.
It was a phrase Aaron used. She couldn’t have given a proper reason for why she had come out with it now. Hannah’s expression was inscrutable. Her ankles were set together and her hands rested in her lap; she looked as if she was drawing herself in and away from the other two, and from the polished order of Elizabeth’s drawing-room.
Marian pursed her lips and drew a line in her notebook.
Under her direction they agreed next on who would make pies and who muffins, where the cold-boxes would come from and how many quarts of cream to order, as they did every year. At last the agenda was covered. Marian said, ‘I’ll have Karyn and Leonie help out, and I’ll ask Gail and those Duhane girls if they’ll do some of the marketing and washing up. They’ll like to be part of the day.’
If Hannah and I had ever liked each other, Elizabeth reflected, we could join forces now and set Marian Beam exactly where she belongs. But the years had gone by and even the pain of long ago had been blunted and tempered by time. All that was left was the dilute sparring that took place over coffee and town celebrations, and the triviality of it made a mockery of what had been powerful enough to divide them in the first place.
It was more than fifty years since Elizabeth had last seen the woman on the island. But the memory of her was still sharp in her mind.
Marian was talking unstoppably as the three of them came out on to the seaward side of Elizabeth’s porch. Hannah had announced that since the tide was low she would walk back along the beach and Marian agreed that she would do the same.
Elizabeth escorted her guests through the garden to the head of her beach steps, where they met Marty Stiegel climbing towards them. There was a little camera slung on a strap around his neck. He gave them his sociable smile and pushed his hair back with two hands, smoothing his temples. ‘I heard there was a summit meeting. I’ve come to offer my services again.’
Elizabeth said, ‘That’s very good of you, Marty. I should have telephoned to tell you we were going to talk about the bake stall this morning.’
‘Marty, you’re a jewel. Are you certain Judith and Justine can spare you for the afternoon?’
‘Sure thing, Marian. It’s good that we summer complaints can give something back to the town.’
Hannah offered him a nod and made to move past at the top of the steps, but he blocked the way with a sun-tanned arm. ‘Let me take a picture, ladies.’ Without waiting for their answer he lifted the camera and snapped off a couple of shots.
Elizabeth could already see the photograph in her mind’s eye. The three of them ranged in a line, Marian’s floridness and Hannah’s unwinking, suspicious gaze, with herself in the middle, caught, so insubstantial as to be almost permeable to light.
‘That’ll be ten bucks,’ Marian laughed. She was waving to grandchildren on the beach. She kissed Marty flirtatiously on the cheek and swung her red skirts down the steps to the shingle.
After Marty had gone there was a moment when Hannah and Elizabeth stood on their own. Elizabeth could have counted almost on one hand the number of times they had been alone in the past fifty years. ‘How is Aaron?’
‘Not as strong as he was,’ Hannah said. ‘But still himself.’ She thanked Elizabeth formally for her hospitality and descended the steps, straight-backed, without putting her hand on the guard rail. Down on the beach she seemed to melt into the background of the bay, like one of the birds she resembled.
The island lay in its skeins of water and rock. If it were not for the boats and holidaymakers in the foreground, the wide view was the same as it had been when Elizabeth was a girl. How have we grown so old, she wondered. How have we grown so that so little matters any more? She turned her back on the beach and the bay, and bent to tear the dead heads off her flowers.
It was a hot day. Corn-weather, as Aaron and Hannah might have called it. The sea was a restless plate of ripples and the beach stones and sand were baked dry by the sun. At the southern end of the beach there were clusters of sunbathers on spread towels, lying between their encampments of picnic baskets, sand toys and rubber inflatables. Children ran into the waves, kicking up arcs of spray. The families from the five houses were out too. John Duhane was walking the low-water line with a panama hat pushed down on his head. Ivy lounged in her bikini, using Lucas’s bent knees as a backrest. Beam children and friends leapt and shouted on either side of a volleyball net, and Judith Stiegel sat reading
