been playing softball all afternoon and Ivy was angry with him for neglecting her. She sat sideways at the table where Lucas was eating a double crab roll, with one smooth thigh touching the leg of Sam Deevey’s jeans. Sam was one of the locals and a bit of a hick, she thought, but not at all bad-looking in an Antonio Banderas kind of way.
‘You coming down to the beach tonight?’ Lucas asked her, his mouth full of crab and mayo.
Ivy barely turned her head. ‘I’m going to watch the fireworks with Sam. Maybe afterwards.’
‘Sure,’ Lucas said uncertainly. He wasn’t used to rejection, even by someone as gorgeous as Ivy. The evening in prospect was uninviting without her.
May waded out of the sea and shook the drops off her hair and skin like a dog. It had been so hot that for once the cold shock of the water was welcome and she was glad there was no one about to see her in her swimsuit. She stood with her back to the houses and the deserted beach, rubbing her chin with the corner of her towel. The sea was flat and milky pale, reflecting the mild early-evening sky. The island’s hunched back bristled against the colourless horizon. Then she heard confident footsteps treading the shingle behind her.
‘Hi,’ Marty called to her in his friendly way. Judith and he were younger than most of the other beach adults and he liked to make his social moves between the generations of parents and teenagers, seeming to belong with equal ease to both groups. ‘Are you all on your own? Want to come up and have a Coke or something with Judith and me?’
‘Okay,’ May said. She pulled a wrap over herself.
There was baby stuff spread all over the Stiegels’ floor and Judith sitting in the middle of it with Justine on a diaper across her broad knees. May loitered awkwardly, wishing she hadn’t come, while Marty fetched drinks for them.
‘Are you having a good time up here?’ Judith asked. She was so big, with her solid shoulders and upper arms rounded like boulders on the beach.
May knew she was a sculptor and thought she looked a bit like a sculpture herself. One of those massive, immovable pieces of work that sit on lawns outside public buildings. ‘Yes, thank you.’
Once the baby was parcelled up in a stretchy sleeping suit Judith calmly hoisted her shirt and undid her bra. A vast white breast spilled out and Judith took the nipple between thumb and forefinger and pressed it to the baby’s mouth. Its gums clamped and it began noisily sucking. How disgusting, May thought giddily. Never. I’ll never do that.
Marty came back and she gratefully took the Coke and drank with pretended thirst, not even asking if it was a Diet one. ‘Come through here.’ He beckoned.
There was a small room off the main one, obviously used as a study. There were a desk and a laptop computer and a fax machine, and a scatter of folders and notepads. Marty busily opened an envelope file and May saw that it was bulging with black-and-white photographs.
‘You take a lot of pictures.’
‘Uh? Yeah. I’m lucky. My work is my hobby.’ She remembered now that he was a photographer in the city, taking the pictures for ads. ‘Here they are.’
He fanned a handful of the photographs expertly in front of her. It was the volleyball day. There was Lucas, with his hair swinging up from his forehead. And Ivy and Gail, clapping hands. Marty found the shot he was looking for. May was leaping high in the air. All the picture’s huge energy was driving through her arm and clenched fist. Seeing it brought back to her the power and exhilaration of the moment. She looked like someone else, perhaps in a Nike ad, not herself at all. ‘Oh,’ she breathed. She turned her lit-up face to Marty. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’
He patted her shoulder. ‘I was pretty pleased with it. I’ll get you a copy.’
The photograph gave May an unfamiliar feeling of warmth. She put it down with reluctance. ‘Thank you. I’d love that.’
She cocked her head to one side to examine the other pictures in the sheaf. There was one of Elizabeth with Mrs Beam and Mrs Fennymore, standing at the top of some steps. The picture had been taken from an angle below them so they loomed grotesquely. Their contrasting features were sharply delineated, but something in the patina of old age made them seem three different versions of the same witchy old woman. Alarmed, May looked away quickly.
‘Marty?’ Judith called from the adjoining room. ‘She’s spat up. Can you pass me the towel from her bag?’
He hurried away and May could hear them dealing with the baby emergency. Idly she poked at the concertina openings of the picture folder. One of the sections held a squared wad of pictures tied with a piece of braid. Without thinking May picked out the package and looked at the uppermost photograph.
It was of a girl sitting on a rock. Her arms were wrapped around her drawn-up knees, but there was movement in all the lines of her body, as if the photographer had unexpectedly called her name and she had turned happily to see him. Her face was solemn but it was about to break into a delighted smile. Her eyes were locked straight into the lens.
May was gazing at the picture when Marty came back. She fumbled and almost dropped it, ashamed she had been caught snooping into his folder. She held out the little package, but he didn’t take it from her. ‘Who is she?’ May asked, already knowing the answer.
Marty said, ‘Doone Bennison. Would you like to look at them?’
‘Yes, please.’
She undid the tie. There were a dozen photographs, all of Doone alone. In a windbreaker, a polo shirt and in one case a lifejacket with the wind whipping her hair across her cheeks. She had a heavy, rather pasty face with thick eyebrows and a wide mouth, but her smile was transfiguring.
May gazed at her and her eyes fastened on Doone’s as if they were meeting in the flesh. But she was looking at a stranger. Nothing about Doone’s features was familiar, or even remarkable, except for her smile. May was amazed at how happy she looked. ‘She looks … she looks ordinary. Like any girl.’ A stupid thing to say, May thought, as soon as it was out. It was only her deadness that made her any different, and the diary of her love.
Marty was standing at her shoulder, solid and self-assured and detached from all the whispering undercurrents that washed the beach, in the adult way that her father was and the other men from the five houses, except for Lucas. May suddenly felt reproached by his normality. She was clumsy and intrusive, like a voyeur with Doone’s pictures in her hand. She folded them together abruptly and handed them back. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be snooping. It must have been terrible when she drowned.’
‘It was. For everyone at the beach.’
Of course she was still here in their memories, her life and her death. They were all back for the next summer, enjoying their vacations because that was what you did, you carried on with living. Just like she and John and Ivy were doing, even though Alison had died. But Doone would still inhabit the place for the Beams and the Stiegels and the rest. They would remember seeing her on the rocks where Marty had taken her picture and on a towel on the sand, and in the sea that had taken her away. She was there even for May, who had never seen her face until today.
May shivered. Only the thinnest membrane separated the beach people from another multitude that held Doone and Alison and the island woman. The divider was as opaque as a Pittsharbor mist and as insubstantial. Any of them could slip through it. Maybe without even knowing it.
The
