mostly in silence. Then John had stood up and said he would see her back to the Beams’ house. They had flitted through the Japanese garden and descended the beach steps. Their footsteps mushed noisily on the shingle and the waves sucked at the tideline.
At the Beams’ stairs John had stepped back, almost melting into the darkness. ‘Good-night,’ he’d said quietly.
An hour before, they had been locked in one another, then May’s staring face had materialised at the window and the glass had shattered under her fist.
‘Good-night,’ Leonie had answered formally, as if they were strangers.
Since then they had only glimpsed each other in the distance.
‘I always find it a good place for thinking.’ The voice made Leonie spin round, a startled gasp catching in her throat. Elizabeth was kneeling beside one of the graves. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’ She motioned towards the headstone. ‘I took the opportunity to come and do some tidying up. Have they finished with you at the bake stall too?’
Leonie moved out into the harsh sunlight and stood at Elizabeth’s side. The plot was well tended and there were fresh garden flowers in a marble um. Screwing up her eyes against the brightness, she read the inscriptions and saw that it was the grave of Elizabeth’s parents. ‘Don’t let me disturb you,’ she murmured, but Elizabeth stood up and brushed at her skirt.
She dropped a pair of secateurs and a trowel into her raffia basket. ‘I’m done here. Perhaps we could sit over there for five minutes.’ There was a bench against the fence, still in the tree’s shade. A patch of scuffed earth in front of it and the scattering of cigarette butts suggested that it was one of the evening hang-outs of the town youth.
When they sat down Leonie groped in her pocket and brought out a pack of her own cigarettes. She had started smoking again in the last few days, ignoring Tom’s disapproval. She lit up and exhaled fiercely. She was calculating that she must have known Elizabeth Newton for all the years she had been coming to the beach, but she couldn’t remember ever exchanging more than polite commonplaces with her.
‘My mother and father are here. But my husband is at St John’s in Boston. Where should I be put when the time comes, I wonder?’ Elizabeth spoke meditatively, as if to herself. ‘In the end it will be Spencer who decides.’
‘Won’t he do what you tell him to?’
‘I suppose he might.’
Leonie suddenly laughed. There was a sly humour in Elizabeth she had never noticed before.
‘What I would really like’, Elizabeth continued, ‘is to be planted out on Moon Island, like Sarah. Now, that is a beautiful spot.’
‘On the island? Sarah who?’
Elizabeth slowly turned her head. She examined Leonie’s face in detail, searching for a sign. ‘It’s an old story. Haven’t you ever heard it?’
The Pittsharbor Day noise from the green was a long way off as Leonie listened. But threading in and out of Elizabeth’s low murmur she thought she could hear the counterpoint of Tom’s voice and Marian calling, and the clamour of children. She frowned in concentration, following Elizabeth’s narrative. The old woman was a good story-teller.
‘Little May Duhane saw her ghost.’
Leonie straightened her back. The gravestones marched away from her across the grass, their shadows beginning to lengthen now. An uncomfortable association that she couldn’t place scratched at her subconscious. ‘I don’t believe in ghosts,’ she said. ‘Or in supernatural warnings, whatever they might be. But I’m sure of one thing. May will be all right in the end, however difficult her life may be now. Her father loves her and he puts his children first, above everything else.’ She paused, looking down at her hands resting in her lap. She twisted the wedding ring on her finger and stared away again over the gap-teeth of the gravestones. ‘It’s her age. The demons of adolescence. They’ll let her go in the end. Don’t you remember what it was like to be that age?’
‘Yes, I remember.’
The tremor in the older woman’s voice made Leonie turn to look at her. ‘I didn’t mean to dismiss the Sarah story.’
‘You didn’t dismiss it. You just said you didn’t believe in one aspect of it.’
Leonie sighed. She gestured away to the green, where the buying and selling was beginning to wind down. Lucas Beam was reversing a pick-up truck too fast towards the grass. ‘Pittsharbor’s a mundane place. We spend muddled, ordinary times in it.’
‘Do you wish for something more than that?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Are you in love with him?’
The question was so unlooked-for that Leonie found herself answering without calculation. ‘Perhaps. Or I could be if I let it happen, which I won’t.’
Of course Spencer had passed on what he had seen in the car-park that day. How is it, Leonie wondered, that there are any secrets at all in a place as small as this?
‘It’s none of my business, I’m sorry.’
‘You’re right.’
But Elizabeth was not deflected by the finality in Leonie’s voice. ‘Forgive an old woman’s intrusion. At my age there isn’t much to do but observe other people’s lives and make presumptuous conclusions about how they should handle them. You aren’t very happy, are you?’
There was no point in attempting a denial. The children were much closer now, running past the fence that separated the graveyard from the green and Leonie tilted her head to watch them as Elizabeth talked.
‘Don’t pass up the chance of happiness, if you think it might be within your reach. When it’s gone you will never stop regretting its loss.’
‘It sounds as though you speak from experience.’
‘I do,’ Elizabeth said. Leonie waited with interest and the beginnings of sympathy, but the older woman didn’t say any more. Instead she added, ‘I saw the ghost too, when I was not much older than May. I asked who she was and my grandmother told me the story.’ Elizabeth’s hands opened as they lay in her lap. Her wedding and engagement rings were worn to thin gold hoops and they were loose on her finger. ‘It’s like a duty, a piece and a part of belonging to the beach, to hand on the history. Keeping the thread running.’
‘To hand it on to May and me? I don’t feel that I belong here. The opposite, in fact. I wouldn’t know about May.’
‘You remind me of each other. You’re alike.’
The incongruity of the idea made Leonie hesitate, then suddenly she thought, yes. Maybe we are. Maybe that’s why we mistrust each other. ‘And you too,’ she said with conviction. The idea comforted her. ‘What do you think I should do, Elizabeth?’ Using her name was a token of friendship.
‘I can’t tell you what to do. All I know is that I didn’t take a chance, a gamble, a long time ago. I was sorry for it afterwards.’
‘I see. Thank you,’ Leonie said.
Ivy
