creased T-shirt. His hair hung down around his face and when he leant over Leonie for the milk he gave off a powerful waft of sweat and stale alcohol. He yawned. ‘Is Grammer all right after last night?’
Karyn scraped a ribbon of yoghurt from Ashton’s chin. ‘What d’you mean? What happened last night?’
‘I thought I was the last one in but Grammer came back a few minutes after me. Mrs Fennymore had called up to ask for some help. The old man was taken ill. They hauled him off to the hospital.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Karyn said. ‘That’s really tough.’
They heard Marian coming down the stairs and fell silent as they waited for her, all of them looking at the door. She appeared in a tom silk kimono with her hair standing out in a thick mass of grey and silver coils. Her face was marked with creases and there were dark pouches under her eyes.
Her children made themselves busy around her and even the grandchildren paused for a second in their intake of breakfast. Marian was irritable and rejected the coffee Shelly gave her as too weak. She rebuked Lucas for being only half dressed, before settling at the table in the place she always occupied. She answered their questions about Aaron in a sharp voice.
He had had severe breathing difficulties, and had become ill and distressed. Hannah had called for an ambulance, then telephoned Marian. ‘She was distressed herself. I went to help, that’s all. There wasn’t much I could do.’
Leonie watched her. There was a difference in Marian this morning that she couldn’t quite place. The kitchen was too full, there was too much light and noise and talk. Marian drank her coffee and pulled her kimono more securely around her bulk. After she had finished she went to the telephone, but there was no reply from the Fennymores.
‘Hannah must be still at the hospital.’
She brushed aside the questions and went out of the porch door, leaving her children mutely raising eyebrows at each other.
Leonie dutifully loaded plates and knives into the dishwasher and swept crumbs off the Formica into her cupped hand. Each small action took on significance for being the last time she would do it here. Today she would have to leave. She felt the potential energy spring-loaded inside her, surely just enough of it to carry her away and out of the gravitational field of Pittsharbor. Beyond that, she had no idea.
She found Marian sitting alone on the cluttered porch. The old wicker chair with a beard of broken cane hanging beneath the seat was her favourite. Marian’s eyes were fixed on the sea and her arms hung heavily over the chair arms, with the dirty diamonds of her rings looking like marine encrustations on the bay rocks. She didn’t hear Leonie approaching, or see her stop and lean against one of the porch pillars with her arms folded.
Although she had followed her mother-in-law out to the secluded corner, Leonie didn’t know what she wanted to say to her, exactly. It was just that there should be at least some acknowledgement between them of the decline and wastage of her marriage, some honest transaction made and recorded for the future.
I wanted a baby. I didn’t try on purpose to have this ache and a crater in my belly, did I? Do you think it’s worse for you, or for me, maybe? It wasn’t to Tom she wanted to say this, not any longer, but to his mother who had never loosened her grip on him.
At length Marian turned her head.
In the unguarded moment before their eyes connected Leonie saw what it was in Marian that was different this morning and the recognition of it arrested the momentum of bitterness in her.
Marian was transfigured by grief. It washed the hauteur out of her face and left it loose and vulnerable.
An uncalculated movement of sympathy started up in Leonie. She found herself kneeling down beside Marian’s chair and taking hold of her meaty hand. She squeezed it tight until the big diamonds of Dickson’s old-fashioned tributes bit into her clenched fingers. ‘Is Aaron dead?’
‘No. Not so far as I know.’
Marian didn’t yield an inch. But Leonie could still imagine why such a chord of sorrow was sounding within her. The Beams and the Fennymores had lived side by side on the bluff for many years. They hadn’t been close friends, or at least Leonie had never detected any signs of particular friendship, but surely Marian would look back on the summers of her own life lived in parallel with Aaron’s and Hannah’s? The probability of Aaron’s death would make her think of Dickson’s and her own. The grief in her face must be for losses Leonie could only guess at.
It was the place that affected them all. The beach reverberated with sadness. Why did I never recognise it before?
Sadness was thick like the sea-salt in the air, and as blind and all-pervasive as the endless fogs. The peculiar taint of it clung to the Fennymores and Elizabeth, and it crept through her own tissues like a disease. Now she saw the ravages of it even in the invincible Marian. Under the bright, healthy skin of all their summers, the swimming and sailing and barbecue parties and tennis games, lay the invisible cancer of sadness. The spirit of the place.
Leonie tried to dispel it, to rub some warmth back into Marian’s hand. ‘Can I do anything?’ she whispered.
Marian inclined her head. The possibility of a connection stirred between them. Marian felt it too, it was obvious that she did. Leonie thought, Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we can talk to each other. I haven’t tried very hard. I will if she’ll let me. The beginnings of a smile twitched at the corners of her eyes and mouth.
Marian’s head lifted again and she stared at Leonie. ‘Do anything? No, I don’t think so.’
The possibility had been there, lying in the no man’s land between them, and she had seen it and chosen not to pick it up. Not only was it too late, the entire night had passed and now the day was coming round again.
Slowly Leonie let go of her hand. She sat back on her heels with cramp twisting her leg muscles and shook her head as if to clear it after a ringing slap. ‘You never liked me, did you?’
Sidonie had wandered on to the porch. She stood at the top of the steps looking out over the water in her pink dress and jelly shoes. One fist twisted up the hem of the frock, showing her pants underneath. The jet-black spirals on her forehead lifted a little. A breeze had sprung up off the sea and the tentative white mist would soon be gone.
Marian had the grace to look startled. ‘You’re Tom’s wife. Of course I like you, Leonie. It goes much deeper than that, you’re family.’
‘I don’t think so.’ Leonie stood up, looking down on the fuzzy grey circle at the crown of Marian’s head, all the sympathy gone out of her. ‘I think you and I disliked each other from the beginning. The shame is that neither of us ever had the guts or the wit to own up to it. If we had done we might have fought about it, or even laughed at ourselves.’
Richard wandered out with his coffee cup, and Karyn appeared, scooped up Sidonie and ran inside again. ‘What’s happening?’ Richard asked, without much interest.
‘Leonie’s upset.’
‘I’m not upset,’ she answered. The stored-up energy was suddenly released. It carried her along in a seductive rush. ‘In fact, I’m happy. I’m very happy because I’m going to walk out of here right now and I’m never coming back to this place again. I’ve had it with family parties and being an auntie, and a good daughter-in-law.
