what happened?’
May shrugged hotly. She wanted to lay out the details, to have the scald taken out of them by shared exchange and to be reassured she wasn’t a freak, that it was how it sometimes happened with the right person but so disturbingly in the wrong place at the wrong time. But neither could she resist the chance to taunt Ivy just for once. ‘Oh, uh, you know. He was really nice.’ She sensed but couldn’t see the glare of jealous disbelief and enjoyed it like a sip of iced water cooling her parched throat.
Then Ivy gave her low, disbelieving laugh. ‘Was he? With you and your braces? Well, there’s no accounting for taste.’
May bowed her head. The taunt made her mouth fill with metallic saliva and puffed the flesh of her thighs and belly into hateful cushions within her tight clothes. That was how they did it, of course, Ivy and the handful of thin girls like her whom every boy in every school wanted to date. They promoted themselves with an effortless armoury of ridicule and superiority. Under the claustrophobic skin of the day a flood of hatred pulsed through May and directed itself at Ivy. ‘Why are you such a bitch?’
‘Why are you such a baby?’ Her voice was cool and bored as she turned back to her book.
Effortfully May stood up. The memories of the night before were too vivid and unresolved in her mind. They became a series of jerky tableaux, grotesquely overlit figures superimposed on blackness. How hot the sun felt on her head.
Inside the Captain’s House it was at least cool. With the clockwork force of habit May opened the refrigerator and quickly closed it again. The sight of margarine tubs and dribbled mayonnaise bottles was disgusting.
Upstairs, her bedroom held the sound of the sea within it like a conch shell.
The diary lay in its place next to Hannah’s books. May dusted the tips of her fingers over the black cover.
*
Marian sat in unaccustomed stillness. Making considerate detours around her, Shelly and Karyn prepared lunch once the babies had been put down to nap. The younger generation from Lucas downwards, for once aware of concerns beyond their own immediate circle, had taken themselves off for the day to another beach. The telephone rang once and Marian made a heavy movement towards it, but Tom was too quick for her. It was only a girl calling for Joel.
The adults sat down to eat at the kitchen table. It was most unusual for the food not to be laid out on the shady porch overlooking the sea. A fly buzzed drearily against the screened window, and knives and forks clinked in the silence.
‘Will she have gone back to Boston, do you think?’ Karyn asked.
There was a whitish, pinched area of skin around Tom’s mouth. ‘I’ve no idea where she’s gone.’
‘You must go after her,’ Marian said.
‘I think she’ll come back when she’s ready.’
‘You must go and bring her back.’
Tom put down his knife and fork, neatly positioning them. ‘Leonie is an adult. And so am I. We can make our own decisions.’
There had been so many meals, so many variations on this same rigid theme of family gatherings and advice dispensed. Each of them was used to it, familiar with his or her place in the scheme.
Marian’s lips drew together. ‘I’m not convinced of that, on the evidence.’
Karyn reached out a restraining hand but her mother shook it off.
‘Do you love her? Do you still love each other? Because if you do you’d be a fool not to go after her right now. This is what matters.’ She made a gesture that took in the circumference of the table and the ring of faces.
‘No.’ The crash of Tom’s chair shook them all. He was on his feet, pushing himself away from the litter of plates and broken bread. ‘No,’ he repeated. He turned from the table and left them staring after him.
Marian’s face collapsed inwards, a network of lines meshing her mouth and eyes. She covered the lower half of it with her hand. ‘What does he know about anything?’ she whispered.
Elizabeth sat in her evening room, where the tendrils of a creeper made a minute scraping against the window glass. The irregular sound competed with the metronome ticking of the clock. Spencer had brought her the news that Aaron had been taken to the hospital. She had telephoned once and had been told that Mr Fennymore was stable. Beyond that there was nothing to do but wait.
When she came back from Europe, with her trunks of new clothes and her albums of photographs of Paris and England, and her taste for French cigarettes, it was Aaron who had been waiting.
The Captain’s House was now owned by some people from Bangor, Elizabeth’s mother had told her that in one of the regular letters from home, so there could be no more meeting in the empty dust-barred rooms where feathers waltzed in the breeze of their passing. Instead there had been a chance encounter on Main Street on an afternoon when summer had faded into the smoky chill of late September. Elizabeth had already been back in Boston for almost a month; there had been some parties she had wanted to go to, so she had not made the journey up to Pittsharbor right away. At one of the parties, the engagement celebration of a girl she had been at school with, she had been introduced to a lawyer called Andrew Newton. He was almost thirty, more than ten years older than Elizabeth herself. But she had liked his dry sense of humour and his slightly formal manners because they reminded her of some of the Englishmen she had met on her travels.
‘Newton? Newton?’ Grandfather Freshett had mused. ‘Randwyck Newton’s boy?’
‘I think he must be,’ Elizabeth’s mother responded. ‘Randwyck married Dorothy Irvine, didn’t he?’
‘That’s right.’
Elizabeth would once have felt impatient with this exchange, but now she found that she listened with a flicker of interest and even understanding.
In Pittsharbor, when she did come back to it at last, nothing seemed to have changed. Except, she thought, that the houses looked smaller and Main Street was narrower and more old-fashioned than she remembered. In Purrit’s Dry Goods the very same sacks and cans were arranged behind the salty window glass. And for a night and a day after her arrival she had looked out for Aaron Fennymore with almost the same breathlessness as when she was a girl, eager to slip away with him to the Captain’s House. She had watched the tides and the movements of the fishing fleet, and had wondered when she would hear the signal of his low whistle.
They had written no letters to one another in all the months of her absence. At the beginning of their separation Elizabeth had believed that their love was enough to bind them together without needing translation into the pale medium of words and she also feared that in any case her lover would be no letter-writer. Then, as the months passed, she had been reluctantly and gradually more eagerly taken up in the new world of Europe. Pittsharbor and Aaron had settled deep inside her, precious but untouched. Now that she was back, with the murmur of the sea in her ears and the tiny prickling of salt crystals on the skin of her arms, she was filled equally with longing for Aaron and with apprehension.
When she first caught sight of him, swinging down Main Street with a sacking bag slung over his shoulder, her immediate and terrible instinct had been to duck away and hide from him. There was an arrogance in his bearing and a rough look about him that made a poor contrast
