by Rosie Thomas
He spoke so slowly that his lips hardly moved. ‘Full of sex.’
The woods were full of sex. It was true, but no longer theirs. She nodded her head, complicit and valedictory, with the weight of grief gathering within her. ‘Where has this other girl gone?’ she whispered.
‘I don’t know.’
They were thinking of the black tree trunks and the mossy hollows.
‘How is Hannah?’
‘She didn’t need any supplies. I don’t want her to be hurt, Marian.’
After so long. ‘I know that. I love you, Aaron.’
‘Yes.’
Darkness fell early, bringing with it a shower of sharp rain. The change in the season seemed to have come within the space of a single day. Yesterday it had been full summer, but today there was the smoky, wet-leaf warning of autumn in the air. In a week it would be the end of August, then Labor Day and the summer visitors would empty out of their rental cottages and turn back to the cities.
All the lights were burning in the Captain’s House and the open ground at the road’s end was lined with parked cars. May Duhane had been officially declared missing, twenty-four hours after she had last been seen. With the dark the search for her had been called off, but it would resume at first light.
Marty put Justine to bed. He went through the routines of Pampers and baby-powder and sleep suit, and wound the musical box that stood at the side of her crib, but he was clumsy with her and she cried intermittently. She was teething, and her fat cheeks were flushed and prickled with a faint rash.
He held her on his lap and tried to soothe her, and at last she grew drowsy. Her fists relaxed and her eyes faltered shut, her wet eyelashes making crescents of tiny shadow spikes. He put her in her crib and settled the quilt around her. He was relieved to be briefly free of her unending needs and at once felt the needle of self-reproach. If there wasn’t Justine, what worth was there in anything else?
Downstairs, Judith was waiting for him. She half-turned from the window and the invisible sea, and he saw her as a profile of abstract curves and mounds, flesh compressed and seamed by her clothes. ‘Pour me a drink,’ he begged. ‘I thought she’d never sleep.’
‘Wine okay?’
‘Anything. Just alcohol.’
Their voices sounded flat, all the resonance leached out of them by the damp and the cloudy vapour of apprehension.
‘Any news?’
‘I haven’t heard anything,’ Judith said.
‘I wish there were something …’ Marty whispered. A knock at the door made them gaze at each other in hope and fear.
It was Spencer Newton, a cashmere sweater over his summer shirt. ‘Do you have five minutes?’ he asked.
‘Sure. Come on in.’
Judith was behind them, nursing her glass of wine, listening.
‘No, I wondered if we might take a walk along the beach.’
Marty looked back over his shoulder. He sketched a gesture of puzzlement at his wife and answered, all compliance, ‘Right now, Spencer? Well, okay, if there’s something I can help you with.’
Judith looked dubious, but she dismissed them with a reminder to Marty that they should eat before too long.
The rain had eased off, leaving the air cold and moist. The beach pebbles glistened like jet underfoot and long black waves with curling lips of grey foam seemed superfluous to so much wetness.
They had been silent as they made their way down to the water’s edge. Marty was constrained, as if he knew and feared what was coming. When they reached the tideline they began to walk towards the Pittsharbor steps.
‘Do you know anything about where May Duhane is?’ Spencer asked now, without preamble.
‘Nothing. If I did, I’d have told her father.’
‘Or the police.’
‘Yes, if it was relevant. What is this? What are you suggesting?’
Spencer’s even tone didn’t change. He told him he had seen May going up from the beach with him on Pittsharbor night.
His version of the scene sounded odd and Marty quickly defended himself. ‘That was forty-eight hours ago, she’s been missing for twenty-four. Plenty of people saw her in the meantime, including her father. I told John about the other night. May and I met on the beach, she said there’d been a family upset and asked if she could come up for a drink. She did, we chatted for maybe an hour, she went home. That was all, and as it happened I didn’t even catch a glimpse of her the next day. Judith and I went over to Bar Harbor for lunch with friends, if it’s any of your business. I’ll tell the police that too, when the questioning starts. If the kid doesn’t come home before then.’
Spencer’s head was turned away, towards the sea and Moon Island. ‘Look, Marty, I’m sorry. I don’t want to do this. I ask because of something else I saw.’
‘Jesus.’ Marty was angry now, with a quick defensive heat.
‘Last year I was walking in the woods towards Berry Island. I lost the path and came down close to the shore, and I found myself overlooking an inlet I’d never come across before. Just some sloping rock shelves and a finger of water. There was a cave or a funnel beneath me because the waves were booming in it.’
The darkness hid Marty’s face. But he stopped walking and waited, his shoulders rigid.
‘You were there with Doone. Her Mirror dinghy was made fast in the inlet.’
‘I know what you saw.’ Marty rapped out the words, cutting Spencer short. ‘Do you make a habit of spying on people? Have you got a thing for it, you and Alexander?’
‘No. But five days later the kid was dead.’
‘Why didn’t you report it at the time?’
‘She was already dead. It was an accident, a drowning. Judith was about to have a baby.’
‘But now another one’s gone missing it’s one too many, is that it, Spencer?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fuck you,’ Marty spat at him. He swung round and Spencer automatically stepped back. He stumbled and a wave broke over his loafer, and he swore in his turn.
‘Listen.’ Marty advanced and pressed his face close to Spencer’s. ‘I took pictures of her. She liked posing for me. I took pictures of her with her clothes on, and that day she wanted the pictures with her clothes off. Spread out on the rocks, just like you saw. It was her idea. They were good pictures, too. I got rid of them, of course. Okay, she was naked. She was the model.
‘But was I naked, Spencer? No, I wasn’t, was I? I was just the photographer.
‘Did I screw her? No, I didn’t. She was a virgin, the postmortem showed that. Didn’t you know? So you don’t know quite everything, do you?’
‘Why would a fourteen-year-old girl want to pose in the nude for you, Marty?’
The man hesitated. The wind of his anger dropped and left him deflated. For an ugly minute Spencer thought he would cry, beg for his silence. But in the end he only answered softly, ‘She had a thing for me. She thought she was in love with me.’
‘And you liked it, didn’t you?’
‘God help me. But this one’s quite different. I don’t know anything about her. Or where she’s gone, or why. I swear I don’t.’ Marty’s shoulders dropped, he spread his hands imploringly. ‘Do you believe me?’
Spencer’s mouth was twisted with distaste. But he answered truthfully, dismissively, ‘Yes, I believe you.’
The sky was a perfect unbroken bowl of china blue. She lowered her head so it rested against the pillow of rock and let her eyes close. The sun burned coppery discs behind her eyelids and the heat of it radiated up from the rocks and entered her bones.
Here and now, she whispered to herself. He was here with her now, which was all that mattered.
After the happiness misery always came, but while it was with her the intoxication was worth anything, any of the jealousy or the loneliness.
When she opened her eyes again she saw him with his head bent over the viewfinder of his camera, the favourite old Leica. She heard the shutter click before her mouth curved into a smi
le. She felt powerful; what she wanted she would have. ‘Take some more pictures of me.’
He came and sat close beside her on the slab. She could smell his sweat and the muskiness of it excited her. She smiled at him, teasing, with the tip of her tongue nipped between her teeth.
‘Haven’t I taken enough pictures of you?’ He laughed.
‘We could do some different ones.’
‘Different?’
The sea was blue-green, flecked with gold, big and easy in front of them.
In answer she undid the buttons at her front. She slipped her arms out of the sleeves and grasped her forearms, seeming to luxuriate in the sun’s heat on her skin. Then with a quick movement she unhooked a strap and let the cups fall away to expose her breasts. His mouth opened a little and she smiled again, offering herself
‘So perfect,’ he breathed. ‘A young girl’s body.’
He moved to touch but she caught his wrist, playfully holding him apart from her. ‘Wait.’
She undid and discarded the rest of her clothes. The nakedness, the warmth on every inch of her skin felt magnificent. For a moment she almost forgot he was there; she lay back and gave herself up to the sun. The shutter clicked, and again. She arched her back and put her hands up to her breasts, tilting her head so that her chin fined down and her hair fell in waves over the rock.
They were absorbed in the intricate, threat-woven immediacy of the moment. Neither of them heard or saw Spencer Newton.
She spread her arms and legs now like a starfish, limpet-glued to the tideless rock, and laughed up at the sky. The shutter clicked.
Afterwards, while the power was still strong in her, she let him touch her and he responded because he couldn’t help himself, that was just how it was.
It didn’t last, it never lasted, whatever she offered him.
He was hers and not hers. Always giving not quite enough, holding back, then taking himself away altogether. The buttery gleam of her pleasure gave way to sudden hot anger. ‘I won’t let you go back,’ she screamed at him.
‘I have to go.’
They were sitting apart now. His eyes were shielded with one hand. ‘Put your clothes on.’
She began to cry, without warning, oily tears, which ran down her face and dribbled from her jaw. ‘Please,’ she begged him. ‘Stay here with me a bit longer. Another half-hour. I won’t kick up after that, I promise.’
‘Don’t cry.’ He hugged her, reluctance in every line of his body, and she turned her ravaged face against his shoulder and wept.
‘I love you,’ she insisted over and over. ‘You don’t know how much I love you.’
He stroked her hair, moving his mouth against her skull. ‘No, you don’t. You’re too young to know anything about love. Next year you’ll look back on this and you won’t be able to understand what made you so crazy.’
‘I’m not crazy,’ she insisted, knowing she was. ‘Last year I felt the same, didn’t I?’
She remembered the first time he had taken her sailing, with the wind lathering the water and wrapping hair across her face, and how kind he had been to her. By gravely paying her attention he had lifted her out of being a kid and let her see that there was another world. Every detail of the day was clear in her head.
It hadn’t been his doing, not at the beginning. She was the one who had stepped across into that other place, because she suddenly saw the way into it lit up as if the sun had come out. She thanked him for taking her out and kissed him. Not a peck on the cheek but a real kiss, which grew, like a flower opening. She had felt his surprise and another current: pleasure.
At once she had stepped back, sweet strength in her smile. ‘See you tomorrow,’ she’d promised.
He would have to, he couldn’t resist it. She knew that from the first day. Her knowingness was her strength and her weakness.
She felt no regrets now. Anger and despair, but not regret. It would be like regretting having been born.
‘It’s time to stop,’ he said.
She froze, even the river of tears seeming to dry on her face. ‘No.’ The word was a stone in her mouth.
He ignored her. ‘It’s time to stop seeing each other alone like this. You will grow up and find a proper boyfriend, and you’ll start doing all the things you should be doing at your age.’
‘Going to bars and getting carded and smoking weed and making out, like the Beam kids?’
He stroked the hair back from her wet face. ‘Yeah. All those things.’
‘No.’ She wrenched herself out of his grasp. ‘Don’t put me down with that. I don’t want any of that shit, I want to be with you.’
He wouldn’t even look at her. He was bent over with trouble and the wish to get away from her. ‘Doone. Listen to me. This is wrong, everything we have been doing. I accept the blame, I feel more guilty than you can imagine. But I’m married to Judith and I love her. She’s going to have a baby in just a few weeks.’
She put her head back then and screamed. It was like a thread of molten pain rising out of her throat and burning the air. The echoes shivered around them and seemed to catch and multiply. The voice of pain passed through the trees and all along the shoreline. The scream went on and on until he slapped her face. Then it stopped and the silence seemed absolute.
He whispered, and she felt the heat of his breath on her skin, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to hurt you, I never wanted you to be hurt.’
She tried to be cunning. ‘Even though you did all that to me?’
He was quicker, cleverer by two decades. ‘All what? You are a virgin, aren’t you?’
The desolation of abandonment came down on her. He would leave her and he was already denying her. ‘If I can’t have you I don’t want anything.’
‘You won’t feel like that for very long.’ He was gentle, trying to soothe her, but she didn’t want to be soothed. She needed to be alone now to taste the full flavour of her loss. To fondle it and explore its unseen dimensions.
‘Come on. We’ll go back to the beach now and we’ll forget all this, and in the end you’ll forgive me.’
He took her hand and drew her to her feet. He helped her on with her clothes, thumbed her eyes dry for her and led her over the rocks to the Mirror dinghy.
The sailboat her parents had bought for her, because she had asked for it. They were too busy to sail in it, of course, and were glad for Marty to teach her. And she would have to let him sail her back to them now, because she couldn’t handle the boat alone.
As she stepped in, it rocked violently and she would have fallen in if he hadn’t caught her hand and steadied it.
She sat in the stern while he busied himself with sheets and halyards.
The woman who was watching from the shelter of the trees lifted her hand to her.
Doone said, ‘If I can’t have you I don’t want to go on living. I won’t go on.’
Marty was busy with the sheet, he didn’t even look round at her. ‘Yes, you will. You have got your whole life ahead of you.’
The advancing footsteps grew louder. They were all around her and cold hands plucked at her clothes. May was stumbling backwards, trying to escape, then it seemed that the ground opened like a mouth and she was falling into it. A scream started out of her but it was abruptly silenced.
When she opened her eyes it was on the other side of some long, distressing interval. Time had passed, but she had no idea where it had gone. At first she could see nothing but blackness and her eyes searched the margins of it, not knowing if it was part of her or if she was enveloped by it. There was a cage of pain around her head, and her mouth was ragged and sticky with thirst. She tried to call out, struggling so hard that the cry should have been deafening, but no sound came.
The dark was diluted, then dispelled by the light she had followed into the trees. Someone was singing.
There was a woman with a lantern. May felt no surprise at the sight of her. It was the island woman, in her long clothes, her hair scraped back from her melancholy
bone-white face.
There was a younger woman with her. Water streamed off her and her features were veiled with wet hair, but even so May knew it was Doone.
The singing stopped and the faces came closer.
Doone wound up her hair and fastened it, and knelt down beside May. ‘Why don’t you sit up?’ she coaxed.
When she did so they put their arms around her. They leant back and made themselves comfortable, and Sarah linked her fingers in May’s. Her hand was rough, but it was warm and reassuring.
‘My head hurts,’ May complained.
‘Hurt, hurt, hurt,’ Sarah repeated softly. ‘Come with us and leave it behind you.’
‘Come where?’ The pain was diminishing even as she spoke.
‘We’ll show you.’ Doone helped her to her feet and they took one arm each.
‘How can you, if you’re dead?’ The cunning question pleased her; she would catch them out.
They only smiled.
‘It’s not so far.’
The membrane, May remembered. Forever threatening to dissolve and let one world flow into the next. It had gone completely now and there were no laws of physics or mortality.
They were in a room lit by smoky lamps like the one Sarah had held up in the dark. The walls were coarse stone and great yellow bones hung from wooden pegs driven between the stones; the jawbones of whales. The beams of the roof were so low that they were within easy reach of her hand, the earth floor was smoothed and flattened by the passage of heavy boots. They were not alone here; men in rough clothes sat at the tables. There was one more three-cornered table and the women took their places at it.
May thought of questions she must ask. If she could phrase them right she would learn everything she needed to know. She turned to Sarah, searching her oval face for clues, but her eyes had turned to colourless stones. ‘Why did you die?’
‘Because I believed I couldn’t live. I thought I loved a man.’
‘The Captain.’
Gravely Sarah inclined her head.
At the other point of the triangle Doone was just as she had been in Marty’s photographs, her smile transfiguring her heavy face.
‘Did you leave your diary for me to read?’
‘No. I wrote it out of pain, for love.’
