by this idea, she added firmly, ‘I like it. It’s a good room. And I’m sorry about Doone, I just didn’t know.’
Her words seemed to echo in her own ears, as if she were listening to someone else uttering them.
May sprawled on the bed in Ivy’s room where her sister was getting ready for dinner at the Beams’ house. Ivy had already changed her clothes twice and May was still in the baggy shorts she had worn all day. ‘Ive, did you know about the kid?’
Ivy snapped the cap off a lipstick and coloured her mouth. She lifted one eyebrow at May in the mirror. ‘What kid? What’re you talking about?’
‘The daughter of the people who own this house.’
A shrug. ‘Nope.’
‘She drowned. Last year. Elizabeth told me. She was out sailing by herself and she fell in. She was the same age as me.’
Ivy lowered the lipstick for a second. ‘No. I didn’t know. That’s really sad.’
The shadow falling on Ivy’s face made her beautiful by dimming her china prettiness. May noticed it and for all the jealousy that clogged her veins and weighted her feet, she knew that she loved her sister. She gnawed viciously at the corner of her chapped mouth, not knowing how to deal with the realisation. She complained, ‘Why do you think Dad hasn’t told us about her? I’m only sleeping in her bedroom. He never says anything, does he?’
‘Perhaps he thought it would spook you.’
‘I’m not spooked,’ May insisted. ‘I’m not a baby.’
Ivy shrugged, losing interest. ‘Well, ask him, if you want to know. How do I look?’
‘Nice.’
Ivy had finally settled for a halter top and a tiny skirt. They left uncovered a slice of smooth flat belly. Her legs and shoulders were already turning a pale gold. ‘Nice? Don’t go crazy, will you?’
‘What d’you want me to say? How about hot? You look like you put out big-time, as it happens.’
‘Little bitch,’ Ivy retorted, not without amusement. She was in a good mood. ‘Are you going in those clothes?’
‘Does it matter?’ May jumped off the bed, needing to hide the fact that it mattered too much. ‘Anyway, what about Steve?’ Steve was Ivy’s steady boyfriend back in the city.
‘What do you care about Steve?’
‘I don’t. I thought you did, that’s all.’
Ivy had spent weeks protesting that it was because of Steve that she didn’t want to be dragged away from Brooklyn Heights and made to spend half the precious summer in some Godforsaken seaside town like a kid being sent to camp. ‘I’m here and he’s there. Besides, Lucas is okay.’ Ivy combed out her glossy hair. ‘I saw you checking him out.’
‘I didn’t. I wouldn’t.’
Ivy only grinned. ‘No? One of the kid brothers would do for you. Whatshisname, Kevin. He’s cute.’
‘Shut the fuck up, will you?’
May stared in fury. That’s how it was between them. They veered from being almost friends to raw-skinned irritation, and back again, without any episodes of moderation. Sometimes May wondered if their mother had been around whether she might have been the mediator, smoothing over the spikes of anger and making their attempts to like each other seem less clumsy. John didn’t do anything of the kind. He and Ivy seemed to occupy a different territory, adulthood maybe, which left May stranded somewhere apart. It intensified her loneliness and made her angrier still with both of them. Yet sometimes only Ivy would do: only Ivy understood anything.
She slammed back into her own bedroom. She had spent the whole day in here while Ivy lay sunbathing. The cracks in the paper and the vertical shadows that ran like thin ribs in the grooves of the panelling had already become familiar. May imagined Doone Bennison sitting reading in this same armchair, or lying on her back making figures out of the spidery lines that traced the ceiling. Perhaps she had swung her legs off the bed like this and ducked down the stairs, and then gone out to sail the boat across the bay for the last time.
What was it like to drown?
May pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, experimentally stopping the air. Her heart fluttered against her ribs and she found herself gasping for breath.
Ivy banged on the door as she passed. ‘You coming?’
It was too late now for May to do anything about the way she looked. She could have fixed her hair, at least, or chosen a looser top to hide her fat.
She vented some of the pressure of dissatisfaction with herself by kicking the skirting beside the base of the bookshelf. A neat section of it immediately fell forward and lay on the worn carpet with the unpainted splintery back exposed. There was a rectangular black space behind it.
May knelt down and peered into the hole. Something was hidden in there.
Carefully she reached in and drew it out. It was a hardback notebook with dusty black covers and a scarlet cloth spine. She opened it at the first page and saw girl’s handwriting not much different from her own. The first word on the top line was May.
May licked her dry lips. The faint murmur of the sea swelled in her ears until the room seemed like a giant shell that amplified the greedy waves.
The book was Doone’s, it had to be. This was her bedroom, and May had kicked against her secret hiding-place. Now Doone was writing from somewhere directly to May, and the roar of the sea rose up in her ears and almost deafened her.
She read on with reluctant fascination, her fingers shaking as she turned a page.
It wasn’t her name, she realised. It was a date: 15 May, last year. This was a diary. The dead girl’s diary, tucked into its hiding-place and forgotten.
John and Ivy were calling her.
May closed the book and blew the dust off the covers. She slid it back into the hole in the wall and pressed the loose section of skirting back into place. It fitted closely, with only two vertical cracks to betray its existence. No one would bother to investigate unless they accidentally dislodged the section as she had done. She scrambled to her feet.
John was standing downstairs next to the smoke-blackened chimney stones. He had put on a clean blue shirt.
May rocked on the bottom step, glaring her latest accusation at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell us about what happened to the Bennisons’ daughter?’ It was typical of May not to offer an introduction, just to launch straight into her offensive.
John temporised. ‘All right, May, I should have done. Okay? But I didn’t want it to be a reason right off for you not to like the place.’
She recognised the expression on his face. It was a taut mixture of conciliation, impatience and anxiety, and she often saw it when her father looked at her. Thinking
