matter with you? Will you get down here?’
‘Yeah. Right, I’m just coming.’
Ivy dropped a fistful of cutlery on to the table. In the low, L-shaped downstairs room were chairs and two battered chesterfields, and a television set at one end of the long arm, and the heavy old oak table with a collection of unmatched dining chairs at the other. Even with all the lights on, the corners of the room remained obstinately shadowed. There was a yawning hearth with a stacked log basket beside it and the stone chimneypiece was blackened with smoke. The room still smelt of the driftwood smoke, as if the walls and beams were ingrained with it. In the wall facing the sea was a set of new-looking french doors, flanked by the original small-paned windows.
The unmodernised kitchen was in the short section of the L. John opened and banged shut cupboard doors as he searched for plates and glasses. Two pizza boxes stood unopened on one of the worktops. ‘There must be some goddamn glasses somewhere.’
The steep stairs rose straight up from the back of the room. Surprisingly the banister rails were carved with leaves and flowers.
May drifted down and hesitated beside the table. ‘How old is this place?’ she asked, looking around.
‘Pretty old,’ John answered, pleased by her question. ‘The original house was built sometime in the eighteen-fifties, by the captain of a whaling ship. Which is why it’s called the Captain’s House. Probably it was just this room and the bedroom above. The rest was added later.’
Under her breath Ivy made a small, dismissive sound, ‘Tchuh,’ to show she couldn’t care less about the house or its history, or about being here at all.
John found the glasses in the last cupboard. ‘Let’s eat, shall we?’ he said patiently.
They sat at the oak table, wide spaces between them. Ivy opened her pizza box and began to eat the doughy triangles straight out of it, ignoring the plate she had laid. A thread of cheese looped out of her mouth and she caught it with a silver-varnished little fingernail and pushed it between her pursed-up lips. Ivy could make even such an inelegant manoeuvre look cute and sexy.
May felt hungry enough to have wolfed down Ivy’s entire pizza and her father’s as well. But the waistband of her jeans bit into the solid slab of her belly and the stiff fabric dug into the creases of her thighs. She ate fruit and some plain crackers from the box of supplies they had brought up from the city. She cut the pieces up small and ate very slowly, as the plump mother of one of her friends had once told her they were advised to do at WeightWatchers.
Ivy left two-thirds of her dinner. The mozzarella solidified into a greasy waxen mass around the chunks of mushroom and pepperoni. Even so, May still eyed it covetously.
‘We’ll do the marketing tomorrow,’ John said. ‘It’ll help us to find our way around.’
‘Great,’ Ivy said without inflexion. She tipped her left-over food into the garbage pail, meticulously removing the traces of her own dinner and touching nothing else. ‘Mind if I go upstairs now?’
The taut thread of John’s patience finally snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake, Ivy, couldn’t you sit here with us for five more minutes? You know, family together time? Talking. Sharing things, the three of us?’
Ivy only stared at him. ‘Fantasy,’ she murmured. ‘I told you all along.’
John stumbled to his feet as if he might hit her.
‘Don’t you,’ Ivy breathed. ‘Don’t you ever.’
There was a silence. He had come close to it sometimes, after Ali had gone, but he never had hit either of them.
Ivy went briskly up the stairs. After a minute they heard music thudding out of her room. May sat still at the table, her bottom lip stuck out in a mixture of embarrassment and depression. John went back into the kitchen with the plates. He stacked them in the dishwasher and rubbed down the counter-top with a folded cloth. Then he poured himself a Jack Daniels. There was no ice yet.
Looking at him, May noticed dejection in the slope of his shoulders. Her father was a big man, broad-backed and still dark with only a few feathers of grey showing in his hair, but in her eyes he suddenly appeared smaller and weaker, the way he might turn out to be when he was really an old man. Although what she actually wanted was to hold back and keep herself safe inside the confines of her own skin, she made herself put her arms around his waist and rest her head on his chest.
‘It will be all right. Ivy’ll get over being mad because you wouldn’t let her stay in the city all summer. We’ll have a good time up here, I know we will.’
The warmth of her gesture was contradicted by a much stronger impulse, which kept her body stiff, micromillimetres removed from him, all the way from her forehead to her knees.
‘I guess so.’
He patted her shoulder and she stepped back in relief. ‘I think it’s stopped raining,’ she offered.
John tilted his whiskey glass in the direction of the doors.
‘Want to come out on the beach? Take a walk before bed?’ Slowly, May shook her head. Knowing that she should have accepted and returned his peace gesture, she wanted more urgently to be on her own in the melancholy stillness of the new bedroom, to lie on the European bed and lose herself in a book.
‘I’m pretty tired tonight. I’ll come tomorrow, okay?’
‘Okay.’ He smiled at her.
He refilled his whiskey glass and opened the door to the beach. As he slid the screen aside and stepped out on to the deck a blast of salt-laden wind hit him full in the face. He shivered and lifted his head. There was a covered porch and sandy wooden steps led down from it to an expanse of soaking grass. John walked carefully, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Rainwater drenched his ankles. Glancing up, he saw a wan moon momentarily revealed by flying clouds.
At the far end of the rough patch of garden was another deck, and a heavy wooden post and rail fence on the seaward side. When he reached it John saw that the fence ran along the top of a low wall of rock. On the other side was a short drop down to the beach. The tide was out and he caught the windborne reek of low water. Only a few years ago he couldn’t have stopped the girls from racing out here to explore, even in the wet darkness. Now the deadness of their indifference weighed them all down.
A gate in the fence gave on to a short flight of rough wooden steps. He took a long pull of whiskey and descended to the beach. Crescents of coarse sand lay between patches of shingle. The stones grated beneath his deck-shoes as he crossed to the water’s edge. Ahead, across the mouth of the little bay, he could see the black hump of an island. John knew from the realtor’s description that this was Moon Island. And so the sheltered beach that faced it was known as Moon Island Beach. On the map it was just one of the dozens of bays and inlets that fretted this part of the Maine coastline.
He stared out towards the island until his eyes smarted in the wind. Then he swung south and began to walk the curve where the waves ran out in murky lacings of foam. Up on the bluff the Captain’s House lay directly behind him. There were four other houses overlooking the sheltered bay, strung in a line to his left. From down here their roofs and gables looked gothic and sinister against the storm clouds, but the lighted windows made cosy little squares of glowing amber.
The tide had turned. A seventh
