this naked, elated and despairing condition she had seen the woman on the island.
She described her features and appearance to her grandmother, and the old woman lay back on her sofa and pleated her cashmere shawl between her ringed fingers. ‘There were stories, some of the fishermen’s wives used to whisper about a haunting. They always said in my young days that she only showed herself to other women. To young women in trouble, as a warning and a reminder.’ The diamonds flashed as the fingers suddenly stopped their fidgeting with the soft shawl. ‘Elizabeth, are you in trouble?’
‘No. Of course not.’ She knew that much, at least. Aaron wouldn’t let that happen to her. Elizabeth kept her face and her voice as bright as she could, not knowing that all she achieved was a pain-filled parody of happiness which the old woman chose to ignore. ‘I’m going to Europe, aren’t I? I’m going to see all the sights and have experiences I will remember for the rest of my life.’
‘Yes, my dear, you are and you will,’ the Senator’s widow had said.
*
Aaron and Elizabeth lay in their nest in the deserted Captain’s House. In the house next door Elizabeth’s steamer trunks were packed and her ticket for the Carpathia lay waiting for her. It was the last hour they would be able to steal together.
Elizabeth’s head rested on her lover’s chest. She could hear the steady pounding of his heart and when she moved her fingers she traced the outline of his mouth and the curve of his nose, knowing his features by touch as intimately as she knew her own. She was watching the window above their heads and the infinite gradations of pollen-yellow light that filtered through the salty glass.
‘I knew there was a suicide’s grave,’ Aaron said.
His voice resonated within the arch of his rib-cage and Elizabeth moved her head a fraction, to press her ear closer to the sound. It was like hearing two voices, the inner and the outer. ‘I saw her, standing there in the trees. I know it was Sarah and that she was watching me.’
Aaron would not deny what she had said. He lay in silence, sceptical and separate from her, listening to the contradiction of their joined breathing.
Elizabeth suddenly felt the tears running from the corners of her eyes.
‘I’ll come back,’ she whispered. ‘In a year I’ll come back to you.’
‘Is that it?’ May demanded. She was rubbing the mosquito bites on her bare ankles where the raw patches wept like tiny red eyes. The room, the house and Elizabeth’s murmuring voice made her shudder with claustrophobia. Why had the passage in the book about the grave seemed to jump out at her, when there was just such a real grave, if it wasn’t that Doone had read it before her? Angrily she pushed the thought out of her mind. She could stay real, if she concentrated hard enough. ‘You’re saying, like, this is a woman’s ghost, which only appears to women and I’m in some kind of trouble so she’s warning me just the same as she warned you when you were young?’ She shook her head, not waiting for Elizabeth’s answer, and gave a dismissive bark of laughter. The echo of it seemed to hang in the room.
‘You asked me to tell you the history,’ Elizabeth neutrally reminded her.
May jerked her head, gathering her forces, her mouth set in a hard line. Doone and her obsession, and Elizabeth and all the faded, musty business of regret and old age, and her own half-recollections and the spindrift of unease that rose from the island itself were like a gas threatening to choke her. She needed to jump away from the swirling cloud of it into fresh air. All she wanted was to be like Ivy, who was thin and impervious and desirable. ‘It sounds like total garbage to me,’ she snapped. Then, seeing the displeasure in Elizabeth’s eyes, she had to redeem herself by saying something that was clever but still distancing: ‘I mean, there’s history and there’s hysteria, isn’t there?’
There was a moment’s quiet. ‘You may be right,’ Elizabeth said softly.
May stood up and said that she would have to be getting back home.
The good weather still held. May walked through the stones and spikes of the Bennisons’ Japanese garden to the top of the beach steps. The view unrolled beneath her, shimmering in the heat-haze, as if it had been set up by a director who wasn’t afraid of using all the clichés to convey the perfection of a summer’s day on the beach.
Ivy and the Beams were playing one of their endless games of volleyball. Her legs glimmered like smooth toffee as she leaped and punched, and Lucas’s hair fanned around his face as he dived in response. His back was exactly the same colour as Ivy’s legs. Out on the backdrop of water the handkerchief sails tacked thin wakes behind them.
Marian sat with her baby grandchildren crawling around her and three of her daughters-in-law within ordering distance. Richard Beam slept in a canvas chair with his hat tilted over his face and Marty Stiegel wandered at the lacy edge of the waves. He wore a camera and the baby in a sling across his chest.
Leonie lay back in another low chair not far from Richard. In the midst of the contented families she felt that she was no more than a brittle composition of long bones. John had unobtrusively drawn closer to her chair. He sat on a sweatshirt spread on the sand, his ankles crossed and the fingers of one hand circling the wrist of the other. He was looking out to sea, apparently watching Karyn and Elliot trying to catch some wind in their dinghy sails. He wasn’t an ally, Leonie was thinking, not as she had first imagined he would be, before the kiss in the car-park. Almost without their acknowledgement the issue between them had become bigger than that, and darker because it carried the threat that everything might change because of it.
Before she encountered John Duhane, before this vacation, Leonie had gone on with her life day by day. She had done her job because she enjoyed it and found a refuge in it, and she had been Tom’s wife. The unhappy aspects of their relationship had been forced like a flower under glass by her failure to conceive, but the seeds had been there all along, and she had dutifully watered and tended the plant of their marriage because that was what she expected of herself. She hadn’t looked beyond what she possessed except to long for a baby – a yearning that had soaked up all the desires she had and more.
But in the way that everything can change, irrevocably and absolutely without warning, Leonie knew that her life had taken a different direction now. She didn’t want to drag the bulk of her unhappiness about with her any longer. The weight had become intolerable. If she had the choice simply to drop it and take a new direction – yes, that was the choice she wanted to make. It would have to be her choice. Tom would not do anything to ease the tension between the two of them; the more she thought about it the more certain she became that he would never make himself the villain. And John was inhibited by a debt of honour owed equally to his daughters and to her own married state; she didn’t think he would make the first move, although he hovered close enough to it.
Uncertainty made time stretch and distort, like a long road shimmering in a heat-haze. These beach days of sunshine and waiting, and Marian’s autocracy, seemed to dwindle into infinity behind and ahead of Leonie. She moved her bare feet in the sand, an impatient flurry of movement which made John turn his head and look at her. ‘It’s too hot out here, don’t you think?’ she said to him, the words dropping into a vacuum in which the waves and the gulls and the children’s voices were suddenly silenced. ‘Shall we go inside out of the sun?’
He unlinked his hands and stood up, as easy as if nothing significant were happening. They saw that May was walking in the thin strip of shadow at the foot of the beach wall, but as soon as she noticed they were watching her she veered sharply and arrived at the edge of the volleyball game.
‘Come
