by Rosie Thomas
They had done this before; when the two of them had grown bruised and sticky with kissing he had touched and stroked her breasts with his salt-cracked fingers. He had been almost too gentle, and without properly understanding her hunger Elizabeth had snatched his hands in her own and greedily bitten and sucked at them. She had licked the cuts made by running lines and gutting knives, and the punctures from fish-hooks until he had muttered roughly, ‘Don’t, don’t you do that.’
Today was different. They hadn’t talked about why, but they both silently accepted that the difference was momentous.
In the corner of the room he had spread a rug on the bare boards and a pillow with a split in the seam that exposed the feather innards. He took her hand now and led her towards it. The seaward windows were sealed with storm shutters but cracks had opened in the old wood and they let in long streaks of light to lie like fuzzy blades on the floor. When they knelt and faced each other a few puffs of goose-down escaped from the pillow and floated like minuscule clouds. Elizabeth’s arms rested on his shoulders, and with careful movements he lifted the rustling folds of linen and slid his hands up her thighs.
She shifted a little, hesitant, then yielding. Their mouths met again, familiar after weeks of touching but wider now and wetter, until each of them felt they might slip down the other’s throat and be swallowed up for ever.
A minute later, it seemed, the yellow dress had been dropped to one side and Elizabeth lay back naked with one hand crooked to pillow her head. She had imagined this moment, and feeling ashamed and exposed, but now she was wiser she understood that neither shame nor exposure was at issue. Nor were questions of right and wrong. This was right and it was what she wanted.
He knelt between her spread knees, as naked as she was, his hair as black as ship’s tar and his beaky tanned face taut with longing and concentration. He was holding himself with one hand as if he was afraid he might spill too soon. ‘Is it what you want?’
She hadn’t felt herself to be the leader in any of their doings before this minute. He was two years older and belonged here with the rocks and currents of the shoreline, and he knew and was able to do much more than she ever would because she was a pampered city girl. But still by some alchemy she had become the navigator and the helmsman now. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is.’
Looking at his face and the muscled lines of his body she thought she would melt with love. She lifted her hips, her eyes slanting with a smile, offering herself to him. With a helpless groan he pushed himself into her.
It hurt. The pain of it took her completely by surprise. She turned her head aside, biting her tongue and the inside of her mouth, staring over his heaving shoulder at the walls marked with the ghostly outlines of pictures and furniture. For an instant the room seemed full of ghosts who crowded in to watch her crossing into womanhood. Suddenly fear unfolded terrible wings in her stomach. She gasped, ‘Be careful. Please be careful.’
He was already shuddering. He shouted something she couldn’t decipher and pulled away from her, and she lay motionless with her eyes wide open as he ejaculated. Afterwards she held his head in her arms, strands of his sweat-soaked hair caught in her mouth. The pain had gone as quickly as it had come and her fear had subsided with it. Nothing that happened now, whatever there was in the future, could take this moment from them.
Their first time had been together.
A tiny beat of triumph and relief and happiness began to tick in her throat. She peeled his hair away from her mouth and waited for him to come back to her.
When he opened his eyes he looked dazed, overcome in a way that she had never even glimpsed in him before. He locked her in his arms, pinning her against him. ‘I love you. I want you to marry me.’ The declaration was almost violent.
Elizabeth said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re sixteen now. When you’re eighteen we can do it. We can make them say yes.’ He meant her parents and grandparents, and their old-money objections to a mere Pittsharbor fisherman. His family might be equally old, but they were also poor. It was a big obstacle, a huge barrier set across the future.
‘I love you too,’ she said humbly. It was the truth. ‘Will you wait until I’m ready to tell them about us?’
He smiled then, believing that he would get what he wanted in the end. Elizabeth Freshett would marry him and they would live in a house overlooking the bay and Moon Island.
‘I’ll wait. I’ll go on loving you until I’m an old man and I’ll still love you after I’m dead.’
They lay in each other’s arms in a drift of goose-down, awed by the magnitude of their commitment.
Later, when she walked back alone to her grandfather’s house with the linen dress creased and dusty, Elizabeth was facing the end of the summer and separation from the boy she had just promised to marry in the sun-barred stillness of the Captain’s House. The party was ending and her mother had been looking for her. Amazed that the truth wasn’t clearly written in her face, Elizabeth told her that the sun and heat had given her a headache, and she had been walking on the beach to try to rid herself of it.
‘Look at your dress,’ her mother exclaimed. Appearances were always crucial to her.
‘I’ll go and change,’ Elizabeth answered, the meek daughter with rebellion and love twirling in her heart.
Some of this, only the bones of it without the precious details that were still as clear in her mind as yesterday, Elizabeth told May on the porch of the Flying Fish.
May heard her out politely. She finished her Coke and jabbed the straw into the mush of melting ice at the bottom. ‘You used to sneak off and meet this guy in our house?’
‘The house where you are staying now, yes.’
May didn’t want these confidences. In any case it was inconceivable that this old lady had once been young, let alone had sex – that must be what she was saying in her genteel way – had screwed some nameless fisherman in an empty house they had broken into together. The idea of adult sex, old sex, all the teeming sequences and varieties of it, even and especially Ivy and Lucas, was revolting and threatening. It made May more conscious of the lump of misery lodged inside her but she could only admit obliquely, with her thoughts sidling up to the idea and skittering desperately away again, that the misery was something to do with John and Suzanne, and the threat of John with Leonie Beam. She hunched her shoulders rigidly and glared down into her empty glass.
‘Would you like another Coke, May? It’s my turn.’
‘Uh, no, thanks.’
She wasn’t sure how to extricate herself from this uncomfortable conversation. In an attempt to sanitise the story’s ending she mumbled, ‘So he was your husband, right?’
‘No. I married someone else.’
The bleakness, the note of pure despair in the old woman’s voice made even May look up and beyond her own concerns. ‘Yeah? Why was that?’
Elizabeth paused. ‘I don’t know that it will be in any way intelligible to you. I was a Freshett, my mother was an Archbold from Portland.’
May waited for further explanation.
‘A year went by and I was as much in love as ever. At last, when I was eighteen, I told my mother who the boy was and why I wanted to marry him.’
‘And?’
‘They refused their permission. They were quite adamant, so the choice I had to make was between my family and the life I knew, and a boy whose life and background were entirely different from mine.’
‘Well, that doesn’t sound so hard, in a way. Doesn’t everyone kind of have to make choices when they pick people?’ May was interested now in spite of herself and impatient with the irrelevance of all these family names.
‘Yes, they do. I didn’t understand that really I was free to choose, or at least could try to be brave and set myself free. That’s what I meant when I said you know all kinds of things that I didn’t at your age.’
Was that the case, May wondered? She didn’t feel she had the luxury of any choices in the plodding disc
omfort of her daily existence. ‘So what happened?’ The end of the saga must surely be in sight.
‘I was sent off to Europe. I spent eighteen wonderful months travelling, and living in London and Paris. When I came back I met and married my husband, to please my family. He was a good man, quite a lot older than me, and we lived comfortably together.’
Elizabeth’s glass clinked in its saucer as she gently laid her spoon beside it. Her mouth made a thin river-line with its tiny tributaries of lipstick bleeding away from it. It hadn’t been a happy ending. May guessed clumsily at the implications of regret and missed opportunities threading back through years and years of an old woman’s uneventful life, then she bundled up the thought and pushed it away from her.
In as careless a voice as she could manage she demanded, ‘So what happened to him? The other guy?’
‘He married, not so long afterwards, and had children too.’
The waitress brought the check and laid it on the table beneath Elizabeth’s saucer.
May snatched it up and glared angrily at the total. ‘Why did you tell me this?’ she demanded. She felt close to tears again, unable to deal with the way Elizabeth’s loneliness and long-ago hurt nudged and pressed against her. She felt too fragile to withstand it.
‘Because you told me about the woman on the island.’
May counted her dollar bills and laid them neatly with the check. She knew Elizabeth was waiting for her to make some knowing response. There was some connection between the two stories but whatever it was she didn’t want to make it, or even to think about what it might be. She wished only to regain the safety of Doone’s bedroom, where the diary was brooding in its secret place. She had meant to reread one of the bits, about the pointlessness of everything. She would look at it as soon as she was back there with the door safely closed. John and Ivy would both be busy somewhere, for sure.
‘Well, yeah, okay. One for one.’ She eased her chair back from the table, awkward in the small space, and made a show of looking at her watch. ‘I’ve got to get back, you know?’
Elizabeth reached out and took her hand. May had to force herself either not to snatch it away and run and run, or to stand still and let her shoulders sag while the tears slopped down her face.
‘Can I do anything to help you?’ Elizabeth asked softly.
‘What, how d’you mean help? No, I don’t need anything. Really. Thanks, okay?’
‘Go on, then. If you’re in a hurry, that is. I walk much more slowly than you. Thank you for the tea.’
‘You’re welcome. I mean, I enjoyed it.’ May turned and almost ran down the steps and away from the Flying Fish, back towards the house on the bluff. She was almost there when Spencer Newton and his friend passed in the opposite direction, in their spiffy green Jaguar with the top down. They looked the same, in their designer shades with the breeze blowing their pale hair straight back off their foreheads. Elizabeth would be on her own in the house again.
Down on the beach there was a small group of people gathered around a trailer hitched to the Beams’ jeep. They were wrestling with the transfer of a boat from it to the sea. Tom and Karyn were there, and two other adults, and a fringe of children and teenagers milled around ignoring instructions and loudly contributing their own.
John had been wondering where his daughters were. Ivy and Lucas weren’t in the group, but he caught sight of Leonie in her black swimsuit. He strolled across from where he had been sitting on the steps up to his house. ‘Can I lend a hand here?’
‘Sure, thanks. Grab a hold,’ Tom called over his shoulder. From the driver’s seat of the jeep Elliot shouted a warning and backed the trailer closer to the water. A wave ran up and slapped against the wheels, and the younger children danced around with pleasure at being soaked.
Karyn introduced John to the newcomers, Richard and Shelly Beam. Their three children were pointed out to him.
‘Is this the complete family now?’
Richard grinned, showing a strong resemblance to his brother. ‘Nope. There’s Clayton and Gina and their two still to come. Mike and Anne are in Europe, of course.’
Leonie was on the opposite side of the trailer. When she lifted her eyes to meet John’s she saw that he had acquired the beginnings of a sun-tan and some of the lines of strain had faded from his face. Elliot was still easing the trailer deeper into the water. Leonie looked away, to where Marian had come up to watch the proceedings.
When the trailer had gone far enough Tom directed them to put their shoulders to the boat’s fibreglass hull again. They gave a concerted heave and a shout of triumph as it slid off the trailer and the keel scraped the sand in shallow water.
‘Push her out,’ Tom commanded and they ran it forward into deeper water where it floated free. Children were already swarming under the tarpaulin cover and Elliot was easing the jeep forwards up the shelving sand. John and Leonie were left alone, separated by the space where the boat had been. Among all the cries and laughter and diamond-glittering splashes of water Leonie could hear nothing but a question vibrating between them with a tuning-fork’s meticulous note.
It was absurd to go on meeting and deflecting each other.
In the time that had elapsed since their lunch together she had convinced herself that a question could have two answers. If she and Tom didn’t love each other as they once had done, they were still friends and they were knitted together by history and shared experiences. It was possible to live a calm and ordered life surrounded by siblings and their children, and to take pleasure in work and companionship.
Even as she made these measured decisions a current of revolt ran through her, snapping her shoulders back and her head upright. The opposite answer reverberated deafeningly in her head. It wasn’t enough of a life. Not enough, not enough. It was like a sour chorus to the song of the beach.
She didn’t think Tom even noticed that she handed her allegiance over to him. She was just here at the beach as a part of a landscape, not even making the foreground of the picture.
With three precise and deliberate steps Leonie crossed the barrier of stones to John’s side. She felt gleeful and reckless, as she had done with the kiss in the car-park, and at the same time as awkward as a teenager. Dressed only in a swimsuit she couldn’t find anywhere to put her hands, so she crossed her arms in front of her stomach, cupping her elbows in a stance that reminded her of May Duhane. John was no less fenced around than she was herself – almost all she knew about him was to do with his daughters and his widowhood, and the cautious path he steered through the thickets of responsibility.
A greedy longing to know more, to excavate him and at the same time to be dug out of herself, suddenly blazed up in her like ravenous hunger after a long swim in the sea. She said coolly, ‘Would you like to come for a walk this evening? There’s a good one along the cliff to the next bay and over the causeway to another island. You can do it when the tide’s right.’
Lucas and Ivy were rowing back to the beach. At least, Lucas was rowing; he bent over the oars and the muscles in his back and arms smoothly bunched and lengthened. Ivy lay back in the stem of the boat, one leg lazily hooked over the side. She looked creamy and sated, and at the same time triumphant. Just-fucked was the phrase that came to Leonie’s mind.
John watched them until Lucas shipped the oars and let the boat drift in to the shallows. Ivy sketched a little wave at her father. Leonie knew that John was also weighing the significance of small signals and the major movements they flagged.
Marian had gathered a flock of children around her and was beckoning Leonie. Tom and the jeep had driven away.
‘Yes, we could do that,’ John said. His voice was light, giving nothing away.
Five
The stagnant air of Doone’s bedroom breathed and sighed in May’s ears. Hannah Fennymore’s two books and Doone’s diary lay in a row beside her on the bed quilt. She let her chin fall on her chest as she stared at them, trying to imagine Doone putting her writing aside and pickin
g up the whaling story. To mimic her actions, as if it might help her understanding, she opened the book herself.
The Dolphin’s was an uneventful voyage for the first six weeks. No whales were sighted, but favouring winds assisted the ship’s progress across the Atlantic and Captain Gunnell gave orders for the four whaleboats to be lowered from their davits at regular intervals so that the boat steerers and oarsmen might at least practise their seaborne manoeuvres as often as was practicable.
William Corder learned his part in the boat as readily as he had about the decks and masts of the Dolphin. He was assigned the position of stroke oarsman in the third mate’s crew, from which place he bent to pull his oar at the mate’s command, assisted with handling the small mast, and when the lightweight, sharp-ended craft took in water in rough seas it was his allotted task to bail her out with a canvas bucket stowed for that purpose among the copious whaling gear. The rest of the paraphernalia looked threatening enough to William – there were the tubs with their great coiled lengths of line, the razor-edged harpoon and long lances to be plunged deep into the creature’s innards, and the cutting spades with which great incisions could be sliced in the blubber for holding the whale fast while it was towed back to the ship’s side.
The boat was headed by the mate, who directed their turns and twists with the steering oar while the boat steerer pulled from the forward thwart until they could draw close enough to their target for him to jump up in the bow and throw his harpoon. The four oarsmen rowed for their livelihood, but always with their backs blindly turned to the scene in front, for they were forbidden even to glance over their shoulders at what might lie ahead of them. Their only clues were the headsman’s guttural commands and imprecations, and the light of terror or exultation in his eyes.
Even in practice it was deadly hard work, and William and the other green hands were in no doubt that the difficulties would multiply when there were whales in the offing. They listened with apprehension to the able seamen’s tales of closing in on their quarry – the great sperm whales. They heard how an ugly whale could stove in a boat with one thrash of his flukes and of the perils of a ‘Nantucket sleigh ride’ – when a running whale would drive across the surface of the water, dragging the boat and its occupants in a wild dash in its wake.
