picked it up and carried it like a shield.
The room was empty although the door on to the deck stood open and all the lights were on, as if Marty had hurried out on to the beach without a backward glance.
He told her that Judith and Justine were asleep, that he must go up himself in a minute. But at the same time he moved around the room, turning off some of the lights, switching on some music that sighed in the background. He heated some coffee for May and poured wine for himself. Then they sat at opposite ends of the sofa. Through the half-open doorway May could see the room he used as his study, where the sheaf of photographs of Doone rested neatly squared in the concertina folder.
‘I got a copy made of the volleyball picture for you.’
‘Thank you.’
May drank her coffee, letting it warm her. She didn’t feel any longer that she might be sick at any moment, but a blunt finger of pain prodded behind her eyes.
‘What happened to your mouth? Here?’
Marty leaned forward and dabbed it with a Kleenex. She winced at the pressure where she had bitten the inside of her lip. He showed her the red-brown bloodstain on the pink tissue and at the same time glanced at the Elastoplast on her hand.
‘Oh, no, it’s nothing. I climbed up on the headland and fell over a log or something. Bit the inside of my mouth. Dumb.’
Now a silence grew in the room. It spread, lapping into the corners like an incoming tide until May shifted against the cushions. Then Marty asked gently, ‘Do you want to tell me what’s wrong? I’m a good listener. There is something, isn’t there?’
‘I guess there is,’ May whispered.
She rested her aching head against the high back of the sofa. Instead of closing her eyes she began to talk in a low whisper.
She told Marty about not wanting to come on the family vacation to Pittsharbor with her father and sister, because they were only pretending to be a family nowadays. She told him about the bedroom in the Captain’s House and the French bed, and the way she sometimes felt safe and sometimes trapped in there.
Tentatively at first, then in a stream of words so fast they tangled themselves in her mouth she told him about the woman on the island and Elizabeth’s story about her, and about her fear, and her conviction that Doone was separated from all of them only by the thinnest dimensions of time and space, which shivered and paled, and threatened to dissolve.
Marty was right, he was an excellent listener. He took in the flood without moving or interrupting, watching May’s face.
‘I thought I saw something moving in the trees up there.’
He nodded. ‘I understand exactly. I feel the same, sometimes. In fact I thought I saw Doone on the beach tonight,’ he murmured. ‘But it was you. Moonlight plays tricks.’
A tremor passed through May. Marty took hold of her hand and patted it in reassurance. ‘Imagination is a powerful force, especially in a place like this, which is governed by tide and wind and fog. Of course it works to shift reality into a different dimension. The effects of a vivid imagination like yours or mine can be fearful or delightful. Or both.’
It was only imagination working. That was better to hear than Elizabeth’s unsettling bits of history and personal experience. ‘Can I tell you what I was really afraid of?’
He came closer. ‘Go ahead.’
Here in the pleasant room, with Justine’s baby toys in a basket and the music playing, it was almost easy to admit to it. May half smiled at herself. ‘I thought… I was afraid that somehow I was becoming Doone. That the differences between what we are and what we did were so blurred that she was taking me over. I thought, you know, that I liked Lucas because she had done. I thought everything was connected together and I started worrying about what was going to happen to me in the end.’
Marty was smiling too. ‘You’re nothing like her.’
The reassurance was welcome even though she had heard it before. She sighed with the relief of having confessed her fears and in doing so making them seem small and irrational. Her headache made her roll her head sideways and Marty helped her to cushion it on his shoulder. May let the comfort of his attention wash over her. He was like her father, without the collisions and misunderstandings that governed her relationship with John.
May said, ‘I found her diary hidden in our bedroom.’
Marty settled his chin against her hair. She heard the gentle exhalation of his breath. ‘Did you?’
‘It was hidden in a hole in the wall.’
‘Did you read it?’
‘Yes. After I’d tried not to for a couple of days. That was when it began, when I started feeling that she was too close to me.’
‘Why was that, do you think?’
‘Half of it was stuff about school and friends, and her mother. Just like I’d write if I kept a diary. Except about my mother. But the rest of it was different. She was in love and she wrote about it so weirdly. For her it was either despair or wild happiness. I thought the guy must be Lucas.’
‘But didn’t she say so?’
Marty was so close that his breath was warm and moist on her cheek. The comfortable feeling left her, replaced by a tingle of unease. She lifted her head and edged away, and at the same time she heard a floorboard creak overhead.
‘No. Quite a lot of what she wrote was in code.’
‘Go on,’ he said softly.
‘There isn’t any more to tell.’ May folded her arms.
Marty moved back to the opposite corner of the sofa. He lifted his glass to his mouth, but put it down again without drinking. Upstairs, Justine began to wail. ‘I’ve got to go up,’ he said. His expression had become both eager and submissive in a way that intensified May’s uneasiness. She had a sense that there were fetid adult concerns here, which were at the same time too close to her. The hairs at the nape of her neck prickled, recalling the different sensations Lucas had stirred up.
Justine’s wail became a louder cry.
‘I’m going,’ May assured him. ‘I’ll go the front way, along the lane.’ Marty was barring her way. ‘I’ll be okay. It’s only a couple of steps,’ she promised.
‘Does anyone else know about what you found?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t let it upset you, May.’
‘I won’t,’ she breathed. Marty was already on his way to Justine. May said good-night and let herself out in the opposite direction from where she had come, through the door that faced towards the Pittsharbor road.
As she slipped past the Stiegels’ black Lexus she saw through the tangle of hedge that there were lights and people outside the Fennymores’ house. She reached the lane and looked past the tree where Aaron had once surprised her.
An ambulance was drawn
