by Rosie Thomas
Sarah paid for her food and lodging, and picked up the small carpet-bag containing her few belongings. She slipped her hand once into her deep pocket, making sure her ally was still at her side, then set out along the Pittsharbor road.
Once on the headland within sight of Robert Hanner’s house, Sarah waited impassively behind her screen of bushes until darkness fell. It was late September and the threat of ice already shivered the air. She saw the lamps lit in the windows of the house and stepped out of her shelter, leaving her carpet-bag behind her. She made her way silent-footed between the boxberry plants until she came close up to the house. Then, shadow-like, she melted into the deeper shadows beside the head-high pile of logs that had been providently stacked against the winter. She put her hand into her pocket and took out the long-bladed knife. The steel blinked its cold eye at her as she waited.
It was a weary interval before she heard the catch of the door undone and the creak of hinges. Sarah hefted the knife in her hand. She knew the weight and thrust of it too well from the work of stripping blubber off the stinking carcasses of whales.
Robert Hanner came out to the log-pile.
He was in his shirt-sleeves and with him came the scent of good food cooking and the warmth of a fireside. He bent to gather up the wood.
Sarah knew where to drive in the blade. She must guide it between the ribs and up, up into the tissue of the lung. Her arm, her whole body twitched violently with the anticipated thrust, but she could not make it come. Instead, she saw the body of poor Martin the bowman. He lay in the bottom of the whaleboat, his clothing ripped from him and his chest tom open by the line. She saw the bluish-white splintered ruin of his rib-cage and the crimson pulp within that pulsed with the dying rhythm of his heart. It was an image that still visited her dreams. At the same time she heard the steady voice of good Matthias Plant. His fatherly kindness was a long time ago, but it was almost the last she had known.
The hand that held the knife hung paralysed at her side.
Robert Hanner gathered up the logs and all unknowing turned back to his family fireside.
She left the Captain’s House and the headland, and carried her bag down to the silent harbour.
Moored to one of the jetty posts she found a dory and a stout pair of oars stowed within it. Her one thought was to remove herself, to retreat like a nocturnal animal beyond the reach of light and humanity. She unhitched the boat and bent to the oars. After the weight and speed of the whaleboat the little craft seemed no more substantial than an eggshell as she drove it through the swell.
Sarah rowed herself across the bay and out where the current ran between the island and the rocky promontory that jutted from the headland. Pittsharbor town nestled safely in its hollow, as far out of her reach as the moon.
Her first thought had been to row on to the horizon, until either weariness or the waves extinguished her. But some small flame of self-preservation still burned in Sarah, and the flicker of it made her turn her practised oar so that the dory drew broadside to the island and the shoreline that faced the open sea. She paddled through the surf and the prow of the boat grated on the shingle. With strength that she did not know she possessed she hauled it up out of reach of the greedy tide.
Above the beach she climbed upwards through the pucker-brush. The wind was rising and the first raindrops needled her face.
There was a shelter at the crest of the first ridge. She almost fell against the primitive structure of wood and rough stone, and the door creaked open at her touch. Inside nothing was visible in the intense blackness, but it was at least a protection from the rising storm. She reached out and followed the line of the wall with her chilled hand until she found the cobwebbed corner. She sank down on to her haunches, then to the bare earth floor. Out of her soaked bag she took a shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. Only then did she allow her head to sink on to her knees and the hopeless tears to run out of her eyes.
The wind rose to a shriek, and rain and salt spray battered the walls of the hut. The storm raged all through the night and into the next day.
When the morning light began to thin the gloom Sarah was able to look around her. The few articles left inside the shelter were instantly familiar. There was a long-handled spade whose once-sharp blade was now rusty with disuse and a wooden bucket. The spade would have been used for severing the tendons of a whale’s flukes, and for cutting deep incisions in the blubber by which the creature could be roped and towed back to the whaling ship for dismemberment, and the bucket was just the same as the one she had used for bailing sea water at Matthias’s shouted command. From a peg on the wall looped a coil of whale line and on a shelf above it stood a brave row of pewter tankards.
The shelter into which she had stumbled was a whalers’ refuge, a rough tavern for the crews of the small boats seeking to capture those whales which came close in to the shore. Their business must have been a disappointment because the place had been abandoned. But the irony at having fetched up in such a resort made Sarah’s mouth twist in a bitter smile.
She waited out the daylight in the ruined tavern, venturing out into the wind-tossed open only once, to drink a mouthful of water from a brackish spring and gather a stained handful of wild berries to eat.
When night fell once more the wind dropped at last, but huge seas still battered the growling shingle. Sarah knew there could be no waiting for the waves to subside; she must row back to the mainland and do the deed that was waiting for her. She slipped through the trees and over the rocks to the beach, where the dory lay waiting for her. No fishermen from Pittsharbor had put to sea today.
Somehow she found the strength to propel the boat through the swell and spume to the bay shore. Drenched to the skin and light-headed with thirst and hunger she staggered across the shingle and climbed the rocks of the bluff. The soft lamplight shone from the windows of Robert and Charlotte Hanner’s house.
Tonight she lacked even the cunning to try to conceal herself. She dragged herself to the nearest window and pressed her numb face to it.
A young woman sat within, dark-haired and dark-browed, with her head bowed in tender contemplation of the infant in her lap. In the background her husband busied himself with some small domestic business. The three of them were bathed in light and warmth, with the baby helpless and soft-limbed at the centre of the tableau.
Sarah’s mouth stretched wide in a silent howl. She knew she could not murder Robert Hanner. The determination she had nourished melted away like icicles in May and left her with nothing. The emptiness in her heart was worse than hatred; it was resignation and death itself.
The young wife looked up and saw the face at the window. Her scream as she snatched the child to her breast was so shrill that its echoes cut through the boiling of the waves and silenced them. Sarah turned and ran from the world for the last time.
She took the dory out once more and rowed through the wicked surf to the island. She waded the last few steps with the undertow ravenous at her legs and fell in exhaustion on to the bay shore. The boat tossed in the breakers and was carried away from her.
Somehow Sarah found her way over the island’s crest to her last shelter. She spent one more long night huddled in the tavern corner and when the dirty light of morning crept around her once again she stood upright. She wrote some lines on a piece of paper from her pocketbook and printed the man’s name on the folded sheet, before tucking it securely into her clothing. Then she picked up her bag with the few belongings and the knife that had lain on the earth floor beside her. She carried both of them down to the shore and dropped the bag into the sea. It wallowed at her feet for a moment, a waterlogged torso, then the current sucked it away. The knife she threw after it. It made a cold arc as it flew through the air.
She went slowly back to the whalers’ hut and took the line down from its peg. Whaleline was both strong and light, the finest exemplar of the ropemaker’s art. The best hemp was impregnated with tar vapour and three strands of seventeen yarns e
ach were woven together, every one of those strands separately tested to sustain a burden of one hundred and twelve pounds. Her own meagre weight would make no impression on such a piece of line.
Above the shelter there was a sturdy oak tree with a convenient branch some seven feet from the ground. She climbed into the tree and tied one end of the line to a branch over her head. She lowered the free end and measured the drop with her eye. Then, using the boatman’s hitches that Matthias Plant had taught her aboard the Dolphin, she fashioned the noose.
She did not sit long on her perch with the sea’s merciless chorus loud in her ears. She closed her eyes and dropped into silent space.
Twelve
They stood at the doorway looking in. Ivy peered past her father’s shoulder, twisting a strand of night-tousled hair across her mouth. May’s bedroom was empty. It smelt unused.
‘I don’t know,’ she muttered in answer to John’s sharp question. ‘Last night some time. Before I went out. I don’t know what time I saw her.’
John pushed into the room. He patted the smooth bedclothes as if he might be able to detect the warmth of her body, rattled the catch of the window and ran through the line of clothes in the closet. Then he turned back to Ivy and his face reflected the fear within him as it ran and leaped into the recesses of his imagination. ‘She must have been out all night.’
But when he had come in from Haselboro, from lying in a maze of indecision with Leonie in his arms, he had found his own bedclothes twisted and pushed aside. For reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom someone had tried to sleep in his bed. He had seen the evidence, but had let it lie in the back of his mind because his thoughts were busy with Leonie. The girls’ bedroom doors were closed, the house lights were off and he had assumed they were both safe in their beds. He had taken his own concerns to sleep with him and had not missed May until she failed to appear for breakfast. He was standing at the window watching the crinkled skin of the sea when a shiver of disquiet made him turn back to look at the stairs. The leaf and flower carvings decorating the banister glinted with static menace.
He ran up the stairs two at a time. In May’s room the bed was empty and the covers undisturbed.
He dragged Ivy out of her own bed, and now they stood with the backwash of disbelief and sudden anxiety slapping between them.
‘She won’t be far away,’ Ivy muttered. ‘She’s probably only gone, only …’ and her voice trailed away as she tried to come up with an explanation for her absence. May didn’t have friends, not up here. She mooched around the house or the beach, or drifted irritatingly in the wake of everyone else. John’s fear stirred an answering apprehension in Ivy. ‘I don’t know where she can be,’ she whispered. ‘I saw her, like, before I went out to meet Lucas last night. I left her here, watching TV or something. Lucas and me and the others went out to the island for a bit, just an hour or something. We lit a fire and hung out, but it was sort of cold over there, you know, and there wasn’t much happening. So we just came back and I went off with Lucas for a bit, not back to his place because it’s kind of heavy there right now.’
They were boxed in by truths that it had been easier not to confront and now by unthinkable new possibilities. Ivy took a breath and launched herself at them. ‘It’s heavy because Leonie has left Tom, okay, and there’s family stuff going on. But you know about all that, don’t you? Maybe May going off has got something to do with it.’
‘Why?’
‘She was upset last night. We were talking about the old days, you know? Like, before Mom died.’
John walked the confined width of the room and back again. He pressed his hands together to try to ease the tension that twisted his sinews. He could hear breaking glass, the tapping of rain in the night and the predatory sea, and his mind raced ahead of him, breaking out of reason. ‘What did you say?’
‘Something about Jack O’Donnell.’
‘What about him?’
‘She knew.’ Ivy shrugged, but her dismissiveness was splitting, shredding into fragments. Her eyes reddened with sudden tears.
‘I didn’t know that. How could she? She was only small.’
There was a tragedy for both of them in this. For May, Alison had remained perfect and intact. And her preservation of her mother’s inviolability had been a way for them to preserve it in part for themselves.
‘Well, she did. And I… I laughed at her a bit for being upset by the memory. It’s so long ago and Mom’s dead, isn’t she?’
John didn’t answer. It seemed that he was looking into his own memories for the spectres that hid there.
‘Wait a minute. She asked me if it was just once and I said no, of course not. She must have seen something, I guess. And not understood what was happening.’ Ivy rubbed her face with the back of her hand, an uncharacteristic, savage gesture. The ligaments joining history and today were thick and ugly, and too strong to be severed. May’s awkward anger and her irritating needs and hurts made more sense when they were connected up to Ali and John. It was the same tangle that caught her, too, Ivy supposed, only she dealt with it in a different way. With Lucas and the others she proved to herself that it was no big deal, sex, or love if that was what it was supposed to be. ‘We had a quarrel. She punched me in the face and I took the bread-knife to her. Just in self-defence, I … never touched her. It was over as quickly as it started, I swear.’ Her voice dropped suddenly. ‘God. What can have happened? How can we find out where she’s gone?’
‘We’ll find her,’ John said grimly. ‘What about her things? Has she taken anything with her?’
They hunted through the room, trying not to think that they might only be the first to search it for clues to where May could have gone.
It didn’t take long. Her clothes were all there, down to a knotted pair of shorts left damp and sandy on the floor. Her comb lay on the top of the dresser with a couple of dark, wiry hairs caught in the teeth. Her Walkman was on a shelf, pushed almost off the edge so that the wires and earphones trailed on the floor. There was an Anne Rice novel beside the bed, her place marked with a postcard view of Pittsharbor, and two other old books neither of them had seen before. In the bathroom her toothbrush, toiletries and cosmetics were undisturbed.
‘She hasn’t taken a thing. Nothing,’ Ivy cried.
‘All right. First we ask everyone else on the beach if they’ve seen her. We call a couple of people in New York, her friends, in case she was planning to run back there. Maybe they’ll know other places she might have gone. Can you think of anywhere?’
Ivy shook her head. Looking back at it across the gulf of the morning May’s life seemed dull and predictable, only now with the skew of loneliness. She hadn’t wanted to consider the possibility of her sister’s unhappiness before. The effort of keeping back tears made Ivy glare.
‘After that, if we don’t find her, it’s the police.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Have you told me everything, Ivy?’
It was a shock when their eyes met because it happened so rarely. He thought, I haven’t seen either of them properly for so long. I’ve seen a collision of reproach and guilt and disability, not my children at all. And now, if it’s too late, how will that be?
‘Yes, I have.’
Her glare dissolved for a second and he put his arms around her shoulders. ‘We’ll find her, wherever she’s gone,’ he promised emptily.
Ivy scrubbed her face again and twisted away to look out of the window.
John telephoned the other houses. The news of May’s disappearance caught everyone and slowed the stream of time so it seemed they were moving backwards, sliding in reverse into a day that had already gone.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Karyn Beam said after she told the others. She lifted Sidonie and held her so tightly that the child squirmed and yelled to be put down. No one had seen May since the afternoon before.
Tom had come back from his run and was sitting with Marian on the porch. Shelly had whispered to Richard that she couldn’
t understand why Tom still had to go running when his wife had just left him, but Richard had only said that he supposed Tom couldn’t think what else to do with himself. Marian looked tired and confused. There were no silver or tortoiseshell combs or jaunty scarf in her hair and the mad tousled sheaf of it made her look suddenly like a long-stay inmate of a hospital or a residential home.
‘What’s happening up here?’ Marian kept asking. ‘What’s going wrong with everything?’
No one could answer her.
‘Is John going to start a search? Does he need help?’ Richard demanded. Karyn said John would call as soon as he had a plan or any more news.
They sat waiting on the porch. A little gnawing wind rustled off the sea. In the lulls of it they could hear the voices of Lucas and the younger children out on the tennis court.
When the telephone rang again Karyn ran to it. She came back and said to Tom, ‘It’s Leonie.’
He closed the door behind him so no one could overhear. ‘Hello?’ he said into the mouthpiece.
‘Hello,’ she answered, a statement not a greeting.
‘Where are you? When are you coming back?’
‘It doesn’t matter where I am. Tom, I’m not coming back.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Don’t you understand the words?’
‘Yes. I don’t follow the reasoning.’
Leaning against the sheltered store wall in Haselboro and listening to the passing traffic, Leonie thought herself back to the bluff. There were the gulls’ cries and the scrape of water, and the layers of voices and questions and family commandments from which she had removed herself into silence. By rights she supposed she should feel like a solitary separated wife, a dry husk winnowed out of the corn. She spread the fingers of one hand over her belly in a gesture of consolation. She felt a leap and twist within it, as if her womb had suddenly sprung to life. ‘I’ve left you. I don’t want to come back. I want to talk about a separation.’
