by Rosie Thomas
‘May,’ she said quietly. The picture he conjured up for her was so vivid that it interested her, even though she didn’t want it to. ‘I suppose I might read a book, or write a letter to my family.’
‘And suppose you’d never learned to read or write properly? You might just scratch your name to a contract of hire, no more than that.’
‘They’re sailors’ carvings, aren’t they?’
He gave a sharp nod of satisfaction. ‘They are. They took the materials they had plenty of, pieces of whale bone or tooth, and they carved them like this. They took their carvings home as presents for their wives or sweethearts, or they sold them for a few cents on shore. What do you think of them now?’
She looked again at the tiny whorls and fluted cavities, which with their unwholesome colour now made her think of inner-ear parts, or fragments of joint that would have been better left covered by merciful flesh. ‘I think they’re kind of sad.’ So much time taken, so much skill lavished.
Aaron’s face tightened into vertical grooves as he regarded her. To her relief he only said, ‘Yes. Maybe that’s why I like them.’
‘Can I look at the pictures?’ May indicated the old brown photographs. There was a noise out on the deck and Hannah Fennymore opened the porch door.
‘If it’s history you’re interested in, you should ask my wife to tell you some stories. Hannah the historian, she knows all about Pittsharbor and Maine. I’ve been talking to our neighbour about scrimshaw, Hannah. I found her out the back of the house making friends with the tree.’
Hannah put down a bucket which left a sandy ring on the floorboards. It was half-filled with clams; the Fennymores had clam beds on the portion of beach fronting their house. For fifty years Aaron had rowed out to his lobster traps, too, but now he was too infirm to handle the boat. May remembered that Elizabeth Newton had talked about all this in one of their conversations about Moon Island Beach. She had only half listened then but her interest stirred properly now.
In her clamming boots and thick brown jacket Hannah looked more than ever like some unshowy little bird. Both the Fennymores wore several layers of clothes even though the day was warm, and May wondered again how and why they lived out here all the winter through.
‘Historian? Hardly. No letters after my name. Aaron, haven’t you offered your friend a drink or something to eat?’
May stood up quickly. ‘I have to go anyway.’
‘Come again,’ Hannah said, pleasantly enough. ‘Aaron likes to talk about his collections. Doone Bennison, poor Doone, used to come and listen sometimes.’
‘Did she?’ There was an edgy note of curiosity in May’s voice.
‘Once in a while.’
‘What was she like?’
The two old faces turned to her. They were of an age to have grown to look alike, even though Aaron’s features were much sharper and stronger than his wife’s.
‘She was a lonely little thing,’ Hannah said at length. ‘But I used to think it was by choice. She didn’t spend much time with the other children, the Beams and the local kids. It was as if she didn’t have time for them. I lent her a couple of books to read, I thought she might enjoy them if she spent so much time on her own. Sam and Jennifer Bennison sent them back afterwards, after she died.’
‘Can I look at them?’ May asked.
Hannah paused, as if considering the propriety of the request, then went to one of the bookshelves. She took down two nondescript books in dingy cloth bindings and handed them to May. One of them was titled In the Country of the Pointed Firs and the other Voyages of the Dolphin. ‘You’re welcome to borrow them,’ Hannah said, forestalling May’s question.
‘Thank you. I’ll take care of them. Why did she choose these, out of so many books?’
‘She just seemed interested in the place as it used to be and the local whaling legends. As interested as Doone ever was in anything, that is. There are some old stories, you know. I don’t know if she ever read the books in the end.’
May nodded. ‘Thanks. Look, I’d better go. My dad’ll be wondering where I am.’ Perhaps, she thought. Or perhaps not.
Aaron levered himself painfully to his feet to accompany her to the door, although she wished he would not. Outside again beneath the shade of the tree he said, ‘I’m too old to remember why young women cry. I remember enough tears, but I’ve forgotten most of what stirred them up. You forget nearly all of it, however bad it seems at the time. You learn to live. That may not seem much of a comfort to you right now.’
May shifted her weight. She did not want to talk to Aaron Fennymore about any of this, although it was true he was only trying to be comforting. ‘It’s nothing. It’s just me.’
‘I told Doone the same thing. She didn’t believe me either.’
‘Was she unhappy?’
It was not the kind of question, she understood, which Aaron was interested in answering. ‘You know what happened.’
‘But wasn’t it an accident that she drowned?’
At length Aaron replied, ‘Yes. That was the verdict.’
Curiosity and a chill, queasy premonition crawled together up May’s spine. She wanted to know and feared the discovery, whatever it might be. She persisted, ‘Do you mean that the truth is different from the official story?’
To her surprise Aaron walked a little way away from her and stood staring past the house to a thin segment of the sea. When he turned his head again he spoke quietly, so that she had to inch forward to catch the words. ‘It’s more that there are always layers of truth. Some aspects of the truth you can measure and explain, and others defy you to do anything but accept them for what they are. I haven’t known so many other places that I can compare, but I believe the Beach is particularly resistant to rational explanation.’
May thought, I know that. I knew it as soon as we came here. Before I even knew about Doone.
She didn’t want to ask any more. There was enough to absorb already. ‘Thank you for lending me the books.’ They were tucked under her arm.
‘They belong to my wife. As for the girl, you’re not like her,’ Aaron said, as if that settled their conversation. He waved his stick in dismissal and hobbled back towards the house. May wandered slowly along the lane to the dark full stop of the Captain’s House.
Traffic in the main street of Pittsharbor was almost at a standstill with jeeps and RVs and station-wagons tailing back from the lights. Cyclists threaded between the cars and a steady stream of pedestrians flowed between the shops and the open-air vegetable and fish market. At the stall that Leonie knew always had the best fish John debated with the young stallholder, then bought a sweet, silvery chunk of tuna. She watched him, with her own shopping piled in her arms, as he took the neat paper package and stowed it in his bag.
Tom always did the food marketing swiftly and as if it was a test of his professionalism, prodding and irritably rejecting any merchandise that didn’t please him, and adopting a triumphant air when he brought his kill back home to the lair. By contrast, John seemed to take a mild and uncompetitive pleasure in wandering between the baskets of muddy lettuces and pyramids of melons, settling on his purchases apparently by whim instead of iron rules of quality and value. Leonie found this refreshing.
When they had finished they hesitated beside the road, watching the tailback of traffic.
‘Thanks for the ride,’ Leonie said. ‘Looks like I’ve brought you into town at just the wrong moment.’
After May’s exit Leonie had told John she must do some shopping. It was true: Tom had gone back to Boston to undertake the battle with his chef, otherwise the job would not have been delegated to her, but Marian had handed her a list that morning. Everyone else was busy with children or watersports.
John had said at once, ‘I’ll drive you. I’ve got some stuff to get, too.’
Now he turned his back on the glittering lines of cars and looked down at her. ‘I think we should have lunch.’
Leonie thought for a moment. She had
the impression that there were unspoken negotiations taking place within this bland exchange. The realisation made heat prickle beneath her hairline and the picturesque and fully restored old façades of Main Street took on a more highly coloured focus. ‘What about all this shopping?’ she asked. Of course, Tom would never have left fresh fish broiling in the afternoon sun in the back of a car.
By way of answer John went back to the fish stall and returned with a bag full of ice. They bedded their purchases beneath it in the trunk of the station-wagon. Then he led the way to Sandy’s Bar, the best place to eat in Pittsharbor but no longer patronised by the Beams because Tom had had a disagreement with the proprietor the summer before. It gave Leonie an agreeable feeling of disloyalty to settle herself with John in a corner booth draped with fishing nets and studded with shells.
It was cool in Sandy’s; she pushed her damp hair off her face and eased the armholes of her cotton vest where they cut into her armpits. She was conscious of John watching these small movements; it felt like a long time since a man had watched her in just this way, but she accepted his gaze, letting it lie on her skin like warm honey.
With Tom there would have been critical deliberations over the menu, but now she chose food and drink at random. They were talking about their lives, filling in details that needed establishing before they moved on. She learned that John ran his own business mail delivery service. It was a successful company, but he found the demands of it difficult to balance against the need to take care of Ivy and May. In her turn Leonie described her work as an editor for an art and art-history publisher in Boston. She told him about the economics of high-quality colour printing and her plans to commission a series of monographs on women artists of the twentieth century. A plate of griddled shrimp with a hot Thai sauce was put in front of her and she blinked in surprise, having forgotten what she had ordered.
The talk threaded between them like a line of stitches. After the first connecting seam was made they felt free to change direction. Leonie said suddenly, ‘I’m not comfortable in that beach house, but just the same, Tom always wants us to spend the summer vacation up here. Marian makes me feel that I deliberately don’t conform. That I must be denying her more grandchildren on a whim.’
‘Hasn’t she got enough already? What about the population crisis?’ Their eyes met, testing the strength of the seam. ‘Doesn’t she know you can’t conceive?’
‘Of course she does. But perhaps if I just tried harder. Babies were so easy for her, and for Anne and Shelly and Gina. They’re the other daughters-in-law. Even Karyn, who didn’t manage to get much else right before that, cruised it.’
Looking down at her food Leonie thought of the hospitals; the tubes and the needles and the drugs and the waiting, and the increasingly desperate connections with Tom that had led them there. Tom had become angry with her, that was what had happened. She didn’t blame him for his anger, just for the form it had taken. He had retreated from her, and left her marooned on her island of sterility.
‘Is it difficult to talk about it?’
‘Only in the sense that there isn’t anything to say any longer.’
The waiter removed their plates. Outside, the sky turned the solid, passive blue of mid-afternoon. Back at the house, Karyn or Marian would have put the babies to bed for their afternoon rest and the adults and older children would move softly, allowing them their sleep.
‘Will Ivy and May wonder where you are?’
‘Ivy won’t. I don’t know about May. You saw her, this morning.’
Skewering them with her eyes. Jealous and dismissive at the same time. ‘Yes.’ The talk veered again. They were zigzagging close to intimacy.
‘They were both so hostile to Suzanne. I was amazed by the intensity of it. She was the first potentially serious involvement I’d had after Alison died, and it was almost three years later. At the beginning, when I first introduced her, they were welcoming enough, even friendly. And Suzanne did everything she could.’
I’m sure she did, Leonie thought.
‘She used to come round for dinner at first, and the girls and I would get together and plan a meal we could cook for her. Then she went shopping with them once or twice. May wanted a special outfit or something and Suzanne was a store buyer. Then the four of us went on a couple of weekend trips, which worked out fine. I thought we were going to make something of it, in the end maybe turn into a family.’
Leonie could see how John would want a mother for his girls, as well as a woman for himself. That was natural. But she guessed there were cross-currents of jealousy and mistrust in children, which ran invisible and powerful against the tide of what seemed natural. ‘What happened?’
‘Suzanne began to stay over at the apartment. Not all the time, not even often. But as soon as she did they turned against her.’ He rotated the stem of his glass in his fingers, watching the splintered lozenges of light it threw on the table-cloth. ‘Not difficult to understand why. But it finished everything off in the end.’
Leonie could imagine it. Suzanne’s retreat, John’s resentment, the girls’ pleasureless triumph in their achievement. She began to understand what a landscape the unspoken negotiations between John Duhane and herself might have to cover. A sudden jagged breath caught in her windpipe and even as she pressed her thighs together against the loosening between them, she was forbidding herself anything more. She was married and none of these silent phrases had been in her vocabulary for a long time.
Then something happened. She was gazing at some paired cherries on John’s plate. And as clearly as she saw their waxy sheen and wishbone stalks in front of her she knew that she no longer loved Tom any more than he loved her in return.
The cherries looked so ordinary, and the detritus of the meal spread over the cloth, and yet her bearings had shifted so suddenly and radically that she half-expected them to mutate into different objects. A knife-blade reflected a little asterisk of light at her as she stared at it. For more than ten years she had made her judgements and interpreted her place as Tom’s partner. Now she understood that each of those daily measurements was wrongly calibrated and therefore worthless, because they had no love left for each other. All the pressure of needing a child, and the bitterness and anger and violence that blossomed between them, were rooted in this one truth. A child would just have been a diversion. A bandage for a mortal wound.
For a moment she felt cold and calm, like the oily sea under a flat Maine mist. Then a wave of panic shrugged itself up and washed over her. The plump cherries blurred in front of her eyes, turning to dull blotches of crimson.
‘Are you all right?’ There was a crease between John’s eyebrows and one corner of his mouth was bitten in.
‘Yes. But I’m … thinking. We should take that shopping home.’
The crease stayed, but he was already signalling to the waiter for the check.
Outside he took her arm and steered her between the cars. The line of traffic at the lights was shorter now, and an afternoon daze of heat and lassitude had settled on Pittsharbor. They crossed the car-park to John’s station-wagon and he leant forward to open the passenger door for her. Leonie heard the words in her head. What the hell? she was saying. What does it matter now anyway? She tipped back her head and tilted it sideways a little, so that her mouth connected with his. The kiss shivered through her.
He would have put his hands on her shoulders, gently drawn her against him, but Leonie opened her eyes and over the hot metal curve of the car’s roof she saw Spencer Newton. His dark-green Jaguar was parked in the next slot, there was a brown bag of groceries under his arm and Alexander Gull was following behind him.
‘Hello, Leonie,’ Spencer said, with his feline smile.
‘Spencer, I didn’t know you were up here. Hi, Alexander.’
‘We’ve just arrived. I’m taking some supplies home to mother.’ The corners of his smile curled higher.
Without looking to see his expression Leonie introduced John to them, explain
ing that he had rented the Captain’s House.
‘I see,’ Spencer murmured.
The men shook hands and accepted one another’s assurances that they would meet again on the beach.
John drove with his eyes fixed on the road, but Leonie saw a twist of concern around his mouth. She said as lightly as she could, ‘Spencer is Elizabeth’s son. So he’s an old Pittsharbor man, like Tom. Alexander is Spencer’s partner, they have a rather wonderful gallery in Boston. Alexander paints. Hopperish. Not bad, in fact.’
‘I thought they were sweet,’ John said, and Leonie laughed and broke the tension between them.
‘Oh, Spencer and Alexander are anything but sweet. Spencer is trying to bully his mother and Aaron Fennymore into selling him the land behind the beach. He and Alexander want to build rental condos.’
‘I see. That would change the old place, wouldn’t it?’
‘It won’t happen. Aaron will never let go.’
‘And what about what Spencer just saw?’
‘Can’t I kiss a friend who just bought me lunch?’
‘Of course. If that was what it was.’
Neither of them spoke again. When they reached the Beams’ entrance John took Leonie’s shopping out of the trunk and piled it into her arms.
She said defensively, ‘Marian’ll be waiting for me. There are no cookies for the kids until I get back.’
He touched her arm. ‘Did something happen back there?’
Their eyes met. Leonie wanted to acknowledge to him what her words and manner denied. We’re both wary, she thought. And defensive. ‘Yes,’ she said simply.
He nodded, and turned back to the car.
