By nine o’clock in the morning on Pittsharbor Day preparations in Main Street and on the green beside the church were in full swing. Flags and bunting strung between the Wigwam craft gallery and Sandy’s Restaurant stirred in a gentle breeze off the sea. Main Street was closed to traffic for the day and storekeepers were laying out displays of goods on the sidewalk in front of their windows. The Wigwam’s owner made a pyramid of Native American baskets and arranged an armful of dried flowers on the top.
‘Going to be a good one,’ Alton Purrit remarked to Edie Clark in the Sunday Street Bakery.
‘I don’t know as it makes much odds,’ Edie said with a touch of sourness. The home-bake stalls on the green took away more business than the day’s extra visitors ever brought in.
‘Well, there’s no harm in getting the town talked about by the rest of the county,’ Alton chuckled. The Jenny Any would be full all day long taking visitors on twelve-dollar trips around the bay and islands.
‘Talk never cost anything, of course.’ Edie had to have the last word. She bundled his bread into a brown bag and folded the mouth with a sharp crease before handing it over. When Alton took it without a word she was afraid she might have been unfriendly and to make amends she nodded towards two people passing beyond the bakery window. ‘Nice to see Aaron out and about.’
He was leaning heavily on Hannah’s arm. They shuffled slowly down the sidewalk towards Main Street and the harbour.
‘Mhm. He don’t look too bright, though,’ Alton said. ‘Morning, Edie.’ He tucked his bag inside his year-round windbreaker and headed out into the street.
Aaron stopped for breath on the corner of Sunday and Main. Glancing at his face, Hannah steered him to a bench in the shade in front of Howard’s Hardware. They sat in silence for a minute between two pyramids of saucepans and shiny galvanised buckets, while Aaron sucked the mild air into his lungs. ‘Just look at it,’ he rasped, when he could speak again.
Hannah surveyed the flags and flowers and tables of goods for sale. ‘It’s only a day, what harm can it do? The visitors like it and so do the children.’
When she turned her head again she was pained to see that the seams in Aaron’s cheeks were glistening with tears. She knew him perfectly, from so many years of watching and accepting his ways. It wasn’t just the catchpenny street decorations, or the traders’ determination to do as much selling as possible in the invented name of Pittsharbor Day that had made him weep. They were only the outward signs of changes he could do nothing to prevent. Aaron was crying for a time and a place that he had lost, and for chances that would never offer themselves to him again.
Hannah understood too that he would despise his own grieving, because he would interpret it as weakness. She inclined her head so as to seem not to notice his tears. Her knee-bones stood out tiny and sharp under the folds of her skirt. Then she took Aaron’s arm through hers. The back of his hand when she touched it felt as brittle as a dead leaf. ‘Have you got your puffer?’ she asked.
Aaron used an inhaler to help his exhausted lungs. ‘Not using it out here,’ he reprimanded her. There was a blue tinge to the skin around his lips and the rest of his face was stone grey.
A pair of dead leaves was exactly what they were, Hannah thought, still clinging to the branch while the fat spring buds pushed out all around them. Pittsharbor was putting out new foliage in gaudy colours and they hung on at the tip of their twig, waiting for the brutal wind to dispatch them. How cruel old age turns out to be, she reflected, and a twist of sympathy for Aaron that was all wound up with love and exasperation pulled at her heart. She felt a distaste suddenly equalling his for the new Pittsharbor with its gaudy decorations and artistic shops and hand-painted signs set out to catch the summer visitors’ jaded attention.
The town that she and Aaron had grown up in had been a harsh but logical place. It was governed by the winter ice and short summer’s heat, and by fishing and making do against the weather, and the other plain rules of survival. It had been the same way since the first houses were built around the harbour. There had been no pizza and subs, or quilt shops lining Main Street, or summer visitors in their rental cottages. Except for the Freshetts to begin with and the other families who had followed them out to the bluff. It didn’t occur to Hannah that she might also let herself grieve for a way of life that was finished. She sat and held on to Aaron’s arm instead, gazing expressionlessly ahead of her.
A red jeep swung down Sunday Street and braked noisily in front of the bakery. A young man in bermudas and sneakers leapt out and ran into the store, leaving music tinnily thumping from the jeep’s speakers. Hannah knew him by sight. He came every year to stay at one of the cottages in the woods behind the bluff. The land had once belonged to Aaron, from a parcel he had bought for next to nothing right after the war. In time he had sold it again, using the money from the sale to extend and weatherproof the house where he and Hannah now lived. Over the years a series of boxy houses had been put up in clearings in the woods and the occupants’ name-boards lined the access track that had once led only to a loggers’ clearing. The young man sprinted out again and tossed a brown bag into the passenger seat. He reversed up to the top of the road and accelerated away.
As the din faded Hannah was thinking about Elizabeth Newton. If she had come home from Europe and agreed to marry Aaron, against the Freshetts’ wishes, would he be a happier man now? It seemed cruellest of all that there was no way of telling. The different paths their lives might have taken were as conclusively lost as the old Pittsharbor their possibilities had once inhabited.
‘I’m ready to walk back now,’ Aaron said.
Hannah had left the station-wagon at the other end of Sunday Street, not far from the church. Aaron had insisted that he wanted to walk down the town first thing to see what inanities were going on and that, of course, was what they had done.
They stood up and moved to where the sharp sun sliced across the sidewalk. With the warmth of it on his back Aaron put Hannah’s arm aside. They walked slowly past Edie Clark’s windows. ‘Leave them all to it,’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ Hannah agreed.
Spencer saw the station-wagon with Aaron and Hannah inside as it turned into the Fennymores’ entry from the road behind the five houses. He murmured to Alexander, ‘I’ll call on him now. I guess it’s as good a time as any.’
He waited for a few minutes, then sauntered after the car. Hannah was coming down the steps from the porch. ‘Good-morning, Mrs Fennymore. How are you?’
Spencer Newton had impeccable, slightly old-fashioned manners that went with his preppy clothes and air of unshakeable superiority. Spencer would never be rude, or even abrupt. Like his mother he made Hannah feel wrong-footed from the moment he opened his mouth, but she held her ground on the bottom step. ‘Thank you, Spencer. What can I do for you this morning?’
‘Is Aaron at home?’
‘He’s resting. Can I help you?’
Spencer put his head on one side and smiled. ‘I was hoping to discuss our proposition.’
‘No.’
The smile only broadened. ‘Mrs Fennymore, you can see the sense of it, surely? If Mr Fennymore agrees to sell the land to me it will give him – and you – a healthy capital sum that you can invest against medical expenses, nursing requirements, whatever you both may need in the future.’
Hannah
