that hid the lines of her body. She was a stranger, Elizabeth knew she must be because she had never seen her before in seventeen summers, but she seemed to belong absolutely to the place. She had held up her hand and beckoned, and Elizabeth had begun to walk up the slope of shingle towards her, glancing back over her shoulder to the distant windows of her father’s house and the dark Captain’s House next to it.
When she’d looked up again the woman had gone. Elizabeth reached the spot where she had been standing and searched between the trees, even calling out Are you there? but there was only the sound of her own voice, the sea-birds and the waves. Her feet and legs were soaking and the cold had made her shiver.
‘That was her. That was the woman I saw,’ May cried. Then she stopped short and chewed at the corner of her mouth as she took a reckoning. ‘But I don’t believe it. It was fifty years ago?’
Elizabeth understood that to May it was an aeon of time. She nodded her head.
May sneered bravely, ‘So you’re saying this woman is, like, a ghost, right? Like The X-Files or something?’ Only she couldn’t disguise the flash of fear in her eyes.
‘The Passamaquoddy Indians believed that the island was haunted, or possessed. It was one of their sacred places. Then, in the nineteenth century the whalemen had a small settlement on the seaward side, just a few rough huts for shelter and a tavern. The only building here on the bluff in those days was yours. The Captain’s House.’
‘Yeah?’ May shrugged. But she knew she was caught. She didn’t want to be, she wished she could unlearn what she had already seen and discovered. But Doone and the white-faced woman were much too close to her now; she didn’t know who would step which way, whether they would slip into her ordinary world or whether she would mistakenly break through a membrane and become part of theirs. The boundaries of normality were dissolving, fearfully, as if they were no more solid than a morning’s fog. She wished with all her heart for them to be in place again.
Elizabeth Newton was waiting. Her chair was placed with its back to the light, so May couldn’t see her face properly. She was afraid of Elizabeth, too, and of the other spectres of old age and resignation. She wanted to jump out of her tapestry armchair with its feet like claws and run out of the house, but she didn’t move.
Instead, she sat still, listening to the clock ticking. ‘What did you do after you saw the woman?’
‘I asked my mother first of all. She was a very rational person, May. She believed in everyone and everything having their proper places in the world. If anyone had lived on the island after the whalers were gone she would have known about it. And she didn’t know, therefore no such person existed.’
‘And so you went to your grandmother, right? What was her name?’
‘Elizabeth Page Freshett. I was named for her.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Come into the dining-room with me. I’ll show you her picture.’
Reluctantly, May followed the old woman into the next room. The dining-room was a gloomy place with high-backed chairs ranged down a long table in expectation of guests who would never arrive.
‘I think I told you that her husband was Senator Freshett, my paternal grandfather. That’s his portrait above the sideboard.’
He was a frowning man with side-whiskers and a high collar. May glanced at him and looked away. There was a photograph of Elizabeth’s son done up in academic dress on the sideboard. May reflected on how pleased with himself he seemed and the thought cheered her a little. Elizabeth held out another picture in an oval gilt frame.
The grandmother had a mass of dark hair arranged to crown her head with a miniature turret, a patient expression and a high-necked lace-throated white blouse. May nodded as politely as she could and handed her back.
‘My grandfather bought this parcel of land when they were first married in the 1880s. He wanted her to have a summer cottage. She had a tendency to weakness in the chest and the sea air was believed to be good for her.’
May could imagine the dark-haired woman sitting propped up on some Victorian sofa, mournfully coughing. Boredom and impatience with Elizabeth’s ancestors snagged with her deeper-seated anxiety. She found it difficult to breathe, and her skin crawled and itched so that she clawed at one forearm with blunt nails. Suddenly she thought of Lucas, flip-haired and sun-tanned, and how dismissive he would be of all this musty stuff. And of her childish fears and superstitions. She knew that she was childish, and May so much wanted to be adult, and with him and part of him, that she had to stop herself from groaning in despair.
Elizabeth was telling her about her grandparents building their cottage, and how old Mr Swayne had bought alongside and built the extravagant place with all its gables and gingerbread woodwork, and the widow’s walk at the crown. ‘Long before Marian Beam’s day,’ she said.
May asked, ‘When did Mr Fennymore build his house?’
Elizabeth’s hand touched her throat. ‘Oh, he put it up, let’s see, it wasn’t until just after the war. He went into the building business. His family were fishing people, always had been, but Aaron was different.’
Once she thought of it, May was surprised it hadn’t occurred to her before. ‘It was him, wasn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘It was Mr Fennymore. The boy you fell in love with. And he was only a fisherman and your mother and father wouldn’t let you marry him because your grandfather was a senator? So you went off to Europe and married Mr Newton, and the Fennymores married each other and he built his own house up here. Just kind of to show you that he could? Is that what he did?’
Elizabeth’s mouth went white and she put her grandmother’s picture back on the sideboard next to Spencer’s.
‘Sorry. It’s none of my business,’ May offered. She was trying not to remember what the old woman had told her at the Flying Fish, about sneaking off to the Captain’s House and lying in the goose feathers having sex. With old Mr Fennymore. The thought of it disgusted her. It seemed that sex was all around her, oozing and creeping, contaminating what was supposed to be clean. Leonie Beam making eyes at her father. Ivy and Lucas in their hollow on the island. And another image: a shadowy room, lit by a single shaded lamp. Two people on a sofa, naked legs wound together, and a noise, the same sound, two voices. May squeezed her eyes shut, then forced them open again.
‘Yes, it was,’ Elizabeth said abruptly. ‘It was long ago. It doesn’t matter any more.’
Her voice and the sight of her face helped May to overcome her distaste. She took her arm and steered her to one of the straight-backed chairs. ‘Can I get you something? Some, um, water or anything?’
‘No, thank you. I’m quite all right. No one knows any of this, May. Do you understand?’
I don’t want to know it either, May thought. Why is it me, why should I have to? ‘Did Doone?’
Elizabeth looked startled. ‘No. Of course not.’
That was something. It wasn’t Doone who had fed the knowledge into her mind. She sat down at the table opposite Elizabeth, as if they were about to eat dinner together. ‘I’ve forgotten it already,’ May said. Alison had told her once that it was the right thing to say if
