hurried out in her brown coat and climbed in beside it. One of the men secured the doors and took his place in the seat at the front. The engine started up and the headlamps swung over the ragged grass, so May instinctively ducked out of sight behind the hedge. She shrank further when the ambulance had rolled past her. Someone else was coming out of the house, stopping to lock the door and hurrying towards the lane.
It was Marian. She fled unseeingly past May but May saw her clearly and she was weeping helplessly.
John was reading in the shadowy room, but he threw his magazine aside as soon as May came in. ‘Where have you been? I was about to come out looking for you.’
‘I just went for a walk.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be out for hours?’ He came across to her and tilted her face towards the light.
May pulled away from him. There had been too much touching tonight and her skin felt bruised by it, although it wasn’t the kind of damage that her father would be able to see. She hid her bitten lip behind her hand. ‘So, where’s Ivy?’
‘That’s not the point. Ivy’s adult and you aren’t, not yet. May, why can’t you talk to me?’
There was accusation in his eyes and pleading, when she didn’t want to see either. She wanted reassurance. If she were still a little girl she wouldn’t have to understand any of the things that had happened to her tonight. But John was failing her. Even though he insisted she was a child he couldn’t make anything right for her and wasn’t that what fathers were supposed to do for their children?
She had seen him through this window, which now admitted black sky into the room, except for the pane that was blank with cardboard. His arms wound around Leonie Beam and his face different, distorted and remote. Even the thought of it made her feel sick. And it gave her the old crawling sense within her head, in some dark cavity, that there was something connected but even worse. She would do anything, violent or craven, so long as she didn’t have to turn round and see what it was.
John hadn’t kept Ali safe, had he? How could he shield her either, from anything, when all the time she could read his weakness in his eyes? He wanted things from her, to know that she was all right, when it should be the other way round.
Dr Metz had told her that it was okay to be angry and it was anger that made her say coldly, ‘I don’t know. Talk about what? I just went for a walk, that’s all.’
He tried to make her look at him, to hold her eyes, but she slid herself away.
‘I saw them taking Mr Fennymore off in an ambulance.’
‘When?’
‘Just a few minutes ago.’
‘Poor Mr Fennymore.’
The telephone began to ring and over the insistent noise May said she was going up to her room. Her foot was on the bottom stair when she heard her father answering. After the first hello his voice changed. It was Leonie, obviously.
In the bathroom she ran the bath water at full velocity to block out all possible sound and stripped off her clothes. With one foot she nudged the crumpled heap into a corner. Her body felt polluted and ingrained with dirt. When the bath was full to overflowing she reluctantly turned off the taps. There was silence from downstairs.
She stepped into the hot water and slowly lay down. It crept over her skin until it engulfed her. May let her head sink back until her face swam beneath the surface and her hair fanned out like seaweed. She let out a sigh of bubbles from between her lips.
It would be another hot day, but as yet there was a whitish mist blotting out the sky and sea. The horizon quivered between the two in parallel pale lines of grey and pearl, and the unmoving air was thick with salt. The gulls on the beach stalked and pecked at their wavering reflections in the low-water pools but Leonie stared beyond them at the confines of the bay.
She saw a lobster boat drawing a diagonal line from the headland to the corner of Moon Island. It slid out of her sight behind the outlying rocks but the pulse of the outboard, more subcutaneous vibration than sound, stayed with her for a long minute afterwards. It was a year ago this morning that she had stood with a brown bag of shopping in her arms, watching Doug Hanscom’s boat bring Doone ashore.
A jogger down on the beach reached the steps at the southern end and began the climb upwards. It was Tom, on his morning way into Pittsharbor.
Leonie opened the screen door from the porch, closed it behind her and stood looking into the centre of the house. The wide, shallow stairway with scuffed matting led up from the big hall. On either side two tall, foursquare rooms were filled with white morning light. It was a good house, solid and benign, and untidily comfortable with the well-used and unfussy things that Marian had filled it with. And Leonie was thinking as she walked through the quiet space that she felt about it just as she felt about Marian herself. She could appreciate all the qualities, but she had never been able to make appreciation warm into affection.
In the kitchen she toasted an English muffin and spread it with cranberry jelly. The sunlight cut through the jelly on the blade of the knife to make it shine like a jewel, and it warmed the yellow Formica of the worktops with their edges eroded like a geological formation to reveal the brown and white strata within. Leonie touched everything gently, the handle of the knife, the ridged knobs of the cupboard doors and the taps over the old sink. In Tom’s absence, in his continued and unbroken absence even though they had slept side by side, she was saying goodbye.
She sat down at the kitchen table to eat her muffin and watched the sky beyond the windows. The peace didn’t last long.
Elliot came down the stairs with Ashton in his arms and Sidonie skipping in front of him. ‘You’re up early,’ he said.
Sidonie squirmed up on to a chair and turned a radiant smile on Leonie. ‘Banana me,’ she wheedled.
‘D’you mind, Leonie?’ Elliot asked over his shoulder.
‘Of course not.’
When did I ever mind? I am Aunt Leonie, infertile but obedient.
As Elliot put the baby into his seat Leonie mashed a banana in a saucer. She put a spoon into Sidonie’s fist, breathing in her early-morning unwashed smell of innocent sleep. Sidonie began to eat and the intensity of childish concentration moved Leonie as it always did. Out of Elliot’s sight, under the table, she clenched her empty hands.
Richard was the next to appear, yawning in his bathrobe. ‘Tom gone running?’
‘Yes.’ The question was superfluous. When did Tom ever relax his rigid routines?
The smell of coffee brought Karyn and Shelly downstairs, and two of the younger children who argued about tennis games over their bowls of Cheerios. The noise level rose and Leonie sat within her bubble of isolation and let it break over her. At home in Boston she always ate breakfast alone and in silence. Tom usually stayed in bed longer because he left later for work.
It seemed inconceivable now that she had ever tried to be one of the Beams, let alone kept on trying for so long. Determination was crystallising inside her. It tasted like elation salted with fear.
Usually
