under the ground. Leonie found she was closing out the questions, deliberately pinching off the growths. This distance had been far enough to come for one day.
She leaned across the table instead, pouring the wine, making John talk as they ate. She wanted to listen to him and he obligingly answered the need, first with generalities, then by answering her questions with more telling details about his life and his children. It seemed he lived a self-contained existence now, even though he liked the company of women. Leonie warmed to his independence and to the streak of resilience that she understood was hidden by his pliant exterior. He told her about May not wanting him to come out to Haselboro.
‘I can understand why,’ Leonie said. ‘She wouldn’t want to share you, would she?’
There was a small silence. Then John covered her hand with his. Leonie remembered their lunch at Sandy’s, and the plate of cherries and the moment when she knew she didn’t love her husband any longer. This was just as much a crossing place, she realised, although she didn’t yet know quite what she should make of it.
‘Is it a question of sharing me?’ he asked her.
She gazed down at their joined hands, knowing that he deserved at least an attempt at an answer. And at the same time there was the old shadow of her despair slipping out of the periphery of her vision and disappearing. The way ahead looked suddenly bright and bare. ‘Maybe not yet.’
‘I see.’
They had finished eating. Leonie pushed back her chair and went around the table to take hold of him. ‘Come and lie down with me.’
He stood up but made no other move. A space yawned between them. ‘What does that mean?’
‘I know it’s a confusing message. It means I want to hold you and be close to you.’
‘We can try it.’
The bed had a wooden head and footboard, and a thin green cotton cover. The centre of the mattress seemed to contain the impression of a single large body. They were both smiling at the incongruity of it all as they lay down in one another’s arms. John put his mouth against her hair and she felt the warmth of his breath on her scalp when he whispered, ‘I couldn’t have dreamt of a more romantic setting.’
‘I thought not.’
They hugged the bubble of laughter between them and Leonie thought dizzily, Today I left my husband. Tomorrow I don’t know what will happen. To be happy was a sensation she had almost forgotten, but for all its inappropriateness it was what she did feel.
The bedroom window was a black eye staring at them. Leonie sat suddenly upright and swung out of bed to pull the dingy curtain across and block out the night. When she lay down again John held her and stroked her hair, and her neck beneath the veil of it. The comfort was all-enveloping. Leonie rested her head, letting her bones slowly sink into stillness. His warmth and the smell of him were benign, his breathing a steady rhythm against her heart. She sighed with satisfaction. ‘That is so good.’
‘Yes.’ A movement of his shoulder settled her face closer to his.
‘Can we just lie like this?’
‘Of course.’
The pure silence from beyond the cottage filled the dingy rooms and seemed to cleanse them. Leonie realised that the comfort it gave her was in the absence of the sea’s monotonous mumbling.
They lay in one another’s arms without the need for talk. The awkwardness of John’s arrival had all gone and the minutes slipped past them without being marked or counted. Leonie thought about the last time they had held each other, back in the Captain’s House, before the shock waves of shattering glass cut out the sound of the sea. Dreamily she envisaged sex as a hurtling meteorite, a nugget of inexplicable rock red-hot from its passage through the atmosphere between them. It was separate from each of them and belonged to neither, but it would gouge a crater far bigger than itself wherever it plunged to rest. Whereas this gender intimacy suffused with silence was infinite. It was space itself.
Physical desire had left her. Sex had become associated with her inability to conceive and had been one of the garments that clothed her unhappiness. She had been so unhappy the other night. And without warning May’s face upturned from her bleeding hand came back to her, with the same mute but fully legible lines of misery cut into it.
Is it a question of sharing me? John had asked.
Maybe not yet.
He should go home first to his children. It was already very late.
John’s eyes were open, studying her face. Leonie shifted her position and he misread her intention. He found her mouth with his and busily kissed her. The kiss was half answered, then it shrivelled between them.
‘Is this all wrong?’ he asked. ‘If you want me to walk away you must tell me and I’ll do it. I know how that’s done – it’s moving in the other direction I’ve forgotten about. Only I don’t want to be an instrument in the break-up of your marriage and I won’t offer you myself in exchange for Tom because in time you’ll come to resent the terms of the exchange even if they seem favourable now.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘I would like – yeah, I’d like to haul you off and make you mine in a cabin in the woods. A better one than this. I’d cut wood and draw water for you. Shoot bears, spear fish. Forget about business mail and art history books. How does that sound?’
‘Short or long term?’
‘Uh, long. Whatever that means,’ he corrected himself. ‘You know what the bear and fish world can be like.’
Leonie smiled. His deliberate conjuring of a fantasy world made his intentions as opaque as hers. And that was perfectly fair, she thought. Lightly she asked, ‘Can I get back to you?’
He took her face between his hands. ‘Is that what we’re saying? Not now, but maybe some time?’
‘Yes. That’s what I’m saying, at least.’
The creases at the corners of his eyes deepened. ‘I think that’s the right answer.’
He kissed her again. Then he unwrapped his arms and stood up, easing his shoulders and back, his height making him seem oversized in the cramped bedroom. Leonie wished for a moment that she had chosen now rather than some time. Instead she followed him out into the night, said goodbye and watched until the receding lights of the car had been swallowed up by the woodland.
When she was alone once more she experimentally turned off all the lights in the cabin. The instant darkness made flowers of retinal colour explode within her eyelids, but there was no menace in the star-shapes nor any threat in the night’s mossy silence.
In the Captain’s House after Ivy had gone May forced herself to process through the rooms, throwing open the doors and staring in at the unmoving shapes of chairs and tables. There was nothing here, nothing to be afraid of, but still she shivered with currents of fear. Being alone made her think of Doone and the pale face of the island woman.
When she came back again into the downstairs room she pressed her face against the window with its broken pane and tried to see into the night. Then it came to her that her outline would be thrown up
