style="font-size:15px;"> Back in the spring John had suggested to his daughters that they should share a last, proper summer vacation before Ivy went to college in California. He had in mind that he would teach the two of them to sail, and they would picnic and barbecue and take cycle rides together along the coastal paths. He and his sister Barbara had enjoyed just such a holiday with their parents thirty years ago.
The girls had protested. But in the end, in their different but equally reluctant ways, they had agreed that they would come.
John had written at once to the local realtors and almost by return, from Pittsharbor, they had received the details of the Captain’s House. It sounded perfect. The house was old and picturesque. The beach was partly sandy, unusually for this section of the coast, and private except for a short length at the southern end. One of the bluff houses was occupied year-round by local people, the others had been owned or rented by the same families for years. Pittsharbor was a pretty fishing town with a thriving artists’ colony. It was busy in the summer season but not yet spoilt.
The woman realtor had been quite direct. ‘It’s an unusual opportunity,’ she told John on the telephone. ‘We almost never get one of these houses becoming available for a summer let. The Bennisons have owned the Captain’s House for – oh, let me think – it must be ten years now. They’re doctors, from Chicago. I’m sorry to say that last summer their daughter, their only child, was tragically killed in an accident up here. The family haven’t yet decided whether or not to sell the house. We have been instructed to find a suitable tenant for the place for this season only.’
‘I see. That’s very sad,’ John said. ‘But I think we’ll take the house. It sounds just what we want.’
The whiskey glass held in the crook of his arm was empty now and he had reached the southernmost end of the beach. There were sailing dinghies and little rowboats beached here, tethered at the extremity of anchor chains that ran from concrete blocks half-buried in the sand. The running tide was just lapping at the bow of one of the dinghies, a fourteen-footer with a white tarpaulin cover that shone in the dark.
A flight of stone steps cut in the sloping headland led from the public part of the beach in the direction of the Pittsharbor village road. John retraced his path up the beach towards the Captain’s House.
The wind had dropped and the house was silent. He turned off the downstairs lights and went slowly up the steep stairs. The girls’ rooms were in darkness, their doors firmly closed. His ears sharpened in the stillness and he heard the old timbers overhead shift and creak, as the house settled itself after the storm.
In the sunshine next morning Leonie Beam stood at the top of the steps and surveyed the beach.
Marian, her mother-in-law, was wading into the sea. Her faded cotton skirt was tucked up out of the water, tight across her generous backside. She was wearing a rakish straw hat and a crumpled white smock, and there was a fat, naked baby hoisted astride one hip.
The sky was pearly, washed by the night’s rain. On a patch of sand scraped by the receding tide Marian and Leonie’s husband Tom had already laid out the day’s paraphernalia. There were canvas chairs and a pair of parasols with their white cotton fringes teased by the breeze off the water, sand toys and beach bags and rubber rings, and a rug spread for the babies.
Tom was doing his run. He was at the far end of the beach now, his feet sending up little sparkly silver plumes of spray as he plunged along at the water’s edge. Next he would thud up the stone steps and disappear down the coast road to the village. In Pittsharbor he would buy bagels and newspapers, and come home with snippets of gossip about whom he had seen and what messages they wanted relayed to Marian.
Leonie stood expressionlessly watching him until he reached the end of the beach. Then she went on down the steps and laid her book on one of the canvas chairs.
‘Leonie!’ Marian called to her from knee-deep water. ‘Angel, there you are. What have you been doing? Ashton needs his little sun-hat. Will you find it in the bag there … no, no, the red bag, darling. And bring it to me.’
Leonie obediently paddled out with the hat. Marian swung round and the baby on her hip waved his fists and laughed with delighted pleasure.
‘There’s the boy. Hat on for Grammer, there we are.’ She smoothed the white cotton with a sun-tanned, capable, heavily ringed hand.
Marian Beam was a widow. In her middle sixties she remained handsome, her broad face creased with the lines of a lifetime’s emphatic emotion and marked with the irregular sepia freckles of sun damage. Marian liked to be noticed. She emphasised her large, dark eyes with smudgy charcoal pencil and kept her silvery streaked hair long and flowing. For convenience she pinned it off her face with a series of combs.
Marian loved children. She had had five of her own. Kids were her thing, she often said. And as for grandchildren, well, they were the greatest gift God could bestow. It was her sadness that poor Dickson couldn’t be here to share the joy of seeing them grow up. Dickson was Marian’s late husband. He had died fifteen years before, most probably, Leonie thought, of sheer exhaustion from living alongside Marian for nearly thirty years.
‘You could have married again,’ Leonie remembered saying to Marian years ago, not long after she had married Tom. ‘You were only fifty when Dickson died.’
Marian had smiled luminously. ‘My dear, Dickson was my husband. I couldn’t have thought of anyone else. And I had my boys, and Karyn. I felt rich enough.’
That was how she always talked about them. There were the four boys, of whom Tom was the second, all strapping replicas of their father, and then there was the late, longed-for girl. Karyn was thirty now. She had given her mother plenty of problems but lately she seemed to have settled down. Ashton was her second baby by her live-in partner Elliot. Elliot was black, and the two children were exquisite, plump cafe au lait armfuls.
With the addition of Sidonie and Ashton, Marian now had eleven grandchildren. None of them was from Tom and Leonie.
The two women stood side by side in the water, looking back at the bluff and the houses. The old clapboards and pointed gables were softened by the benign light. Even the tarry dark-stained shingles of the Captain’s House shimmered as if washed with a milky glaze.
The Beams’ was the largest of the five summer cottages overlooking the beach. It stood majestically in the centre, the complicated pitches of its steep roof pierced by dormer windows and surmounted by a widow’s walk. From the flagpole in centre front a faded and frayed American flag twitched in the fitful breeze. Marian always hoisted the flag as soon as she arrived at the beach. Dickson’s flag, she called it.
The house was entirely surrounded at ground level by a wide porch, the home of sagging hammocks and swing seats and surfboards awaiting rehabilitation and windsurfer sails and ancient bicycles, tangled up with driftwood trophies and shells and all the other relics of past holidays. It was just this endless continuity about the place, the silted layers of historical minutiae, which oppressed Leonie.
‘We’ve always done this,’ Tom explained to her at the beginning. ‘Moon Island Beach is embedded inside us all. I can’t imagine spending a summer anywhere else.’
‘Not Europe?’ Leonie had protested. ‘Venice? Tuscany? The French Riviera?’
He had dutifully taken her to Italy for their honeymoon. But the next year, and every year after that, they had returned to the beach. And at the beach house Marian was the matriarch. She presided over daughters-in-law and children
