Lucas and Marty Stiegel. People do these things…. I made him touch me. There and everywhere. Her own collusion in the stew of sex made her feel sick again. ‘Was it, was it just once, Mom and him?’
Ivy laughed out loud. ‘Of course not.’ Her sneer took on a life of its own. It ballooned out of her mouth and swayed in the air between them, greasy and coloured, so that May put up her fists to bat it away from her, and she saw how Ivy flinched at the movement in the fear that May was going to hit her.
The idea lit up in May like power itself. The balloon sneer vanished and instead the space between the two girls was shimmering and splintering with threat. May clenched her fist and punched, and it was like the instant of hitting the volleyball, clean and pure, except that she slammed her knuckles into her sister’s face instead.
Ivy staggered backwards with the bread-knife still in her grasp. It came up in a silvery arc through the glimmering air and came to rest against May’s throat. Ivy was gasping with shock and a red blaze burned on her cheek. The knife blade vibrated against white skin. ‘You fucking little bitch,’ Ivy whispered. But her eyes widened when she saw what her own hand was doing. The fingers opened and the knife fell with a clatter. She put her hand up to cradle her cheek. Slowly they stepped apart, their eyes still locked together.
‘You should be careful what you say,’ May breathed. ‘What filthy things you say about our mother.’ But even as she said it she knew that her world view was askew; it was and had been balanced on the wrong fulcrum. Without thinking, she took her eyes off Ivy, looked round to find John and only then remembered he had already gone to Leonie.
With the contact between them broken Ivy bent stiffly and picked up the knife. She replaced it on the counter top and with her back turned mumbled, ‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘I suppose I knew already. I’d just forgotten.’
The telephone began to ring and Ivy picked it up at once. The change in her face told May it was Lucas. May knew how it was, she had seen and heard it so many times before. He was saying he was sorry, when it should have been Ivy saying it to him. ‘Okay,’ she murmured, sweetly grudging. ‘Well, okay then. If you want.’
May went up the stairs. She opened and closed the door of her room but waited outside it, eavesdropping.
Ivy was agreeing to go out and meet him. There were endearments and a little curl of laughter like a feather settling on still water. Afterwards Ivy called up the stairs, ‘May? I’m going down to meet Lucas on the beach. We won’t be far away. We might go across to the island or something.’
For privacy, to their hollow behind the sandy crescent. Everywhere, and there.
When Ivy had gone the house settled around May into shadow and silence.
There was not much Leonie could do to make the cottage living-room look welcoming. The chairs on either side of a brown shagpile rug were mismatched and hollow-seated, and the dim overhead bulb was dimmed still further by being encased in a cylindrical green shade. She put the jug of wine in the refrigerator, which looked as if it had stood in the same spot on the dented kitchen tiles for the past thirty years. She was humming as she went out into the dusk and picked some spikes of goldenrod from the clump beside the cottage door and arranged the flowers in a chipped earthenware jug from one of the cupboards. A pair of thick, velvety moths swirled through the open door and began a competitive dance around the lampshade. The silence of the woodland clearing and the damp pungency of the evening air soothed Leonie’s spirit.
It was after nine o’clock when she heard the car coming up the track. She stood framed in the doorway and the headlamps swept over her before John extinguished them. A moment later he came in, bringing the outside world into the bleak room. He put paperback novels and a liquor store brown bag on the scarred coffee table.
‘Thank you,’ Leonie said. It was different to see him away from the beach. To be alone together in these bare, banal surroundings was intimate, but at the same time they had slipped out of the beginnings of easiness with one another and back into a kind of anxious formality.
‘Shall I?’ He gestured at the wine he had brought.
‘I’ve got some chilled.’ She poured it into ugly glasses and handed one to John.
He was looking at the chairs and the rug, and in the quietness the moths batted against the lampshade. ‘What are you doing in this place?’ he asked in clear bewilderment.
She looked at him before answering, trying to fit together the impression she had built of him with the reality of this big, greying man, who had brought awkwardness into her cottage. At the same time she caught a glimpse of her own desperation, which now seemed to fade like a shadow behind her. Had it only taken the day’s one conclusive step to dispel it? ‘I’m thinking. Marshalling myself, I suppose.’
She told him about stopping in Haselboro and the connections that had brought her to rest here.
‘It’s a pretty horrible little place.’
‘Is it?’ She was genuinely surprised at his vehemence. It was the bareness and simplicity of the cottage that had appealed to her; a place for people without much money to spare, which was still a shelter and hiding-place in the woods. ‘Well, whatever. I suppose you’re right.’
‘How long will you stay?’
The way he wanted to impose limits and horizons surprised her too. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’ll take some unpaid leave from my job and stay on for a while. Or perhaps I’ll just go back to Boston in a couple of days or a week and do what has to be done.’
‘Have you left him?’
She nodded her head. That much at least was certain. ‘Yes.’
‘Does he know?’
‘I think even Tom will probably have registered my absence by this time.’
‘I meant, does he think you’ve just flounced out and will come sliding back home in a day or so?’
‘Maybe. But I made quite an exit. I threw Marian’s shells over the porch.’ He didn’t know why she was laughing, she realised. ‘I’m not going back. Whatever happens from tonight onwards, I’m never going back to live with Tom.’
She picked up the wine jug and tilted it towards John’s glass but he half covered it with the palm of his hand. Leonie refilled her own glass instead and drank from it. ‘I’m glad to have something to read.’
‘I didn’t know what else I could bring you. If I had known …’ He couldn’t stop himself taking another look around the confines of the room.
‘I don’t need anything else.’
‘No. It seems extraordinary but I don’t believe you do.’
They smiled at each other then, the first time since his arrival.
‘I can even offer you dinner, of a kind.’
On the table in the kitchen Leonie laid out the cheese and fruit she had bought from Roger’s mother, and they sat down facing each other. In both of their minds was
