last night you said you had no idea what you were going to do.’
It seemed a very long time ago. It had been a bad telephone conversation; she had felt in despair. In comparison with that, this airy freedom was entrancing, and the mundane small-town street with its white fences and shade trees and slow-moving cars was poignantly beautiful.
‘Leonie? Are you still there?’
‘Yes. John, will you come and bring me some books? Just a visit, between friends. A glass of wine and some talk. I’ve got a jug of Napa Valley Chardonnay right here in the car.’
He asked for directions and she gave them. ‘I’ll be there in an hour or so.’
‘Will it be all right for you to leave your girls, just for the evening?’
‘Ivy is grown-up now,’ he answered. ‘And May is … well, May will be fine for one evening. I’ll be there soon, okay?’
‘Do you have to go?’ May asked him in her most sullen way. She hated the thought of being left alone, yet could not acknowledge it. ‘Where’s she gone, anyway?’
‘Just up the coast a way. I’m going to lend her a couple of books. Leonie needs someone to talk to right now. Do you want to come up there with me?’
May ignored the suggestion. ‘She wants you, doesn’t she? Isn’t having a husband enough for her, she has to grab you as well?’
‘It isn’t quite like that.’
‘No? What is it like, then?’
John sighed, caught between irritation and the knowledge that he should stay this evening and try to explain himself to May. She had sabotaged his relationship with Suzanne; maybe more honesty would help them all this time.
He hesitated, then remembered that Leonie had called him from a public phone. He couldn’t get back to her to change anything now. May was planted in front of him with her fists balled in the pockets of her jeans. ‘I have a life to live too, May,’ he said quietly. ‘Each of us does. Breaking windows and cutting your hands won’t change the fact; all it does is hurt you and fill me with fear. I love you and Ivy …’
He saw her look away, as if to hide the unwilling pleasure his assurance gave her. He thought, I haven’t talked enough, I haven’t given her the love she needs, the way Ali would have done. ‘And you mean more to me than all the rest of the world. But there are other kinds of wanting and loving as well as this kind.’
He tried to put his hands on her arms and turn her to face him but she stepped aside, round-shouldered. John sighed. ‘Can we talk about all this tomorrow?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Where’s Ivy, anyway?’ he asked.
‘How should I know?’
‘I’ll see you later. Watch some TV or something, then both of you have some dinner.’
He tried to kiss her but May jerked away suddenly and the connection became more a blow than a kiss. Then he was on his way out of the door with some paperbacks under his arm.
May watched him drive away. ‘I hate you,’ she yelled into the space he left behind.
Ivy came in later from the beach, in a black mood because Lucas and all the others had been missing for the whole day. May was huddled with her feet on the chesterfield cushions, staring at the television. Hostility crackled between them, low-key at first as they bickered about supper and the division of chores. The sky outside was turning lead-coloured as the light faded.
‘Where’s Dad gone, anyway?’ Ivy demanded.
May told her, gracelessly.
Ivy adopted her dropped-hip pose, all her slight weight prettily angled. She pointed the tip of the bread-knife at May. ‘You know, why don’t you back off a bit? Why shouldn’t he go see her if that’s what he wants to do?’
‘Don’t point that at me. Because she’s married to someone else, for starters. I came up here the other night and saw them … saw them through the window … it was …’ her voice blurred in her throat, then came out too high and hard. ‘It was disgusting.’
Ivy was staring at her.
The membrane was stretching, thinning. Losing its opacity. ‘I mean, she’s someone’s … Tom’s wife. I mean, how would it have been if Mom had. Had been with …’ May’s voice faltered and died altogether.
Out of the box in which she had kept it jumped the memory. Suddenly and without warning it was there, and she knew what it meant and was amazed by its sharp completeness.
She had been perhaps six or seven years old.
She had woken up in the night, surprised because it seemed that at one minute she had been asleep and the next she was as wide awake as if it were the middle of the day. She was hot and her throat burned with thirst. Usually there was a cup of water beside her bed, but tonight Mom must have forgotten to put it there. She pushed the covers aside and climbed out of her bed. The apartment was quiet but the dim light burned in the hall outside, just as it always did.
She padded out and crossed over to the room where her parents slept. The door was ajar. The room beyond was in darkness and the big bed was flat and empty under its smooth cover. May went on down the hall, remembering that John was away somewhere doing his work.
There were lights in the big room where the TV was. Soft yellow light, from the big cream-shaded lamp on the corner table. Silently she pushed the door wider open.
Her mother and a man were lying together on the sofa. Their legs were bare and twisted together. Her mother’s head was thrown back and she looked as if she was screaming. Only more terrifying than terror itself, there was no scream coming out of her mouth, but a little squeak, soft-sounding, like a kitten’s cry. The man’s breath was rasping. Then he began to moan too. He was saying her name over and over, ‘Ali, Ali, Ali.’
May turned and ran away. She dashed back to her room, pulled the covers over her head and pressed her hands to her ears. She didn’t know how she slept, but she must have done. In the morning she had a temperature. Ali was her mother again, cool and reassuring. She kept her home from school and sent a note to her teacher saying that May had a feverish cold.
She had forgotten it all because she had made herself forget. She had buried it away.
Ivy was still staring at her and she knew that Ivy knew, and now Ivy knew that she knew too.
Ivy gave her little shrug, prodded a bagel with her bread-knife. ‘Jack O’Donnell,’ she said.
May recalled a big, friendly man who had come to the apartment sometimes, no more or less memorable than any other member of her parents’ big group of friends. Ali and John were sociable, they gave lots of noisy parties and big, relaxed lunches on winter weekends, which spilled on into evening drinks. Jack O’Donnell’s had just been one of those faces.
‘You knew about it?’
The shrug again: a twist of her sun-tanned shoulder and a downward pull of the mouth. Ivy was affecting adult knowingness. ‘It happens. It’s not exactly
