by Rosie Thomas
Her breath sobbed in her throat.
‘Help me,’ May whispered, but she had no expectation that help would come. There was no island woman, no Doone; neither Ivy nor her father would hear her entreaty. There was no membrane either, nothing but herself and the whistling emptiness of the brightening air.
‘Again,’ she commanded.
She tested her handholds by pulling on them. They seemed firm enough. Then she sprang up from the foothold. Her feet flailed and scraped as she tried for a purchase. It seemed that she was slipping downwards, but somehow she hoisted her hips over the edge of the hole.
Her feet swung in empty air and her face was smothered with soil and wet leaves. She dragged one knee over, then the other. She found herself crouched on all fours, panting like a dog.
Above her was the broken-down stone wall of what had once been the whalers’ refuge. Behind and higher up the slope was the oak tree. The chinks of sky visible through the canopy of leaves were a mild, smoky blue.
May began to crawl up towards the humped back of the island. Her hands were tom but she couldn’t find the strength to stand upright.
Marty had lost sight of Spencer and Alexander. He thought he must have crested the ridge and begun the descent before them. Either they were still on the landward side and were out of sight and earshot, or the agreed distance between them had widened and they were much further over to his right. He stopped walking and cocked his head to listen. There was the raucous screaming of the gulls and the rustle of the sea, and he made an effort to block them out. There was something or someone moving in the scrub below him; too far down the slope and in the wrong direction to be Spencer Newton.
Marty took a step forward, then another, and stopped to listen again. The crackle of leaves and twigs had stopped. ‘May?’ he called. ‘May, Ma-aa-ay …’
There was an answer, a thin cry: ‘Help me.’
He broke into a run, wildly crashing forward and slowing immediately because he made too much noise. She was still below him, not far away now, he could hear the repeated cry much more clearly. He ducked under the shade-spreading branches of an old tree and saw her. The tiny white oval of her face was turned imploringly upwards.
May knew that rescue and safety were approaching, then she saw who it was.
She understood everything that had happened in a sudden blinding instant and the knowledge made fear hit her all over again. It turned to a hammer-blow that made splinters of pain fire off in her chest so that she stopped crawling and crouched with her arms crossed to protect herself.
She was afraid of him. As soon as he was close enough he saw it and smelt it, a sharp, feral scent. Her fear ignited a flare of panic in him and at once his head was twisting, his eyes scanning the ranks of trees for witnesses. They were alone in the woods, no one else had heard her. She had been lost. She needn’t be found. His fists tightened, white-knuckled, a terrible reflex.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ The words wrung themselves out of her, burning in her parched throat. ‘It was you who came and took her diary. You were the only one who knew about it.’
He took a step towards her. His hands hung heavy now, the fingers thick and clumsy.
‘It was you she loved.’
‘I didn’t hurt her,’ he protested. ‘I didn’t do anything she didn’t want.’
May was very tired. Her eyes flickered and her head was heavy, much too heavy for her shoulders. The bars of her pain cage were closing in, tighter and tighter. Everywhere, and there. Nothing she didn’t want. It was the truth, perhaps. ‘Don’t hurt me,’ she begged. ‘Please, Marty, don’t hurt me.’
He knelt down in a hurry, his shadow blocking out the light. She flinched a little and the sign of her fear made his thoughts burrow on into the darkness. If May was not found, if she was silenced, no one would know. A tide of blood hammered in his ears.
Spencer was whistling, a sharp extended note that shrilled through the trees. Relief surged through Marty. ‘It’s all right,’ he whispered, locking his arms around her so that she whimpered with the pain of it. ‘You’re found. You’re safe now. We’re going to take you home.’
He held May’s head against his chest, stroking her hair. He whistled in answer and shouted, ‘She’s here! I’ve found her!’
She closed her eyes. Later she remembered that he had picked the leaves and twigs tenderly out of her matted hair.
When Alexander had run for help and Spencer was giving her sips of water from a bottle he carried, Marty blindly turned away. He looked down into the deep hole, the old cellar of the whalers’ retreat. He was white to the lips. Lifting his hand to rub a prickle of sweat from his face, he saw that it shook like an old man’s.
Fourteen
The late sun shot an arrow of gilt across the sea. A four-wheel drive truck driven by a police officer in wraparound sun-glasses nosed on to the shingle and a knot of people immediately gathered round it. At the same time a fishing boat appeared in the channel between the headland and the rocks of Moon Island. The onlookers stood watching and in the quiet that fell the steady chug of the engine grew loud. A stretcher and blanket were unloaded from the truck and carried to the water’s edge.
Up among the blooms of phlox and kniphofia in Elizabeth’s garden Leonie and she stood together. Their elongated shadows pointed to the edge of the bluff like signposts. They could see Alexander down in the group on the beach, and the Beams, and Judith Stiegel with the baby in her arms. The black shingles of the Captain’s House next door were warmed by the light to mellow grey-brown, but the house stood empty and silent. John and Ivy had run out and down to the boat, which took them out to the island.
Hannah stood watching too, from the corner of her porch. Aaron was propped in his chair close to the open door. His head lolled and abruptly lifted again as the breath snagged in his chest. ‘What?’ he called out to Hannah.
‘Nothing yet. The boat’s just coming in.’
The boatman cut his engine and two or three men waded through the shallows to hold the prow of the craft. It rocked on the swell and the sound of voices giving orders came across the beach. Leonie felt Elizabeth’s hand on her arm, and took it and held it in hers. The stretcher was laid out on the shingle.
May was lifted out of the boat by one of the men in the water. He hoisted her seemingly without effort and carried her the few steps to the beach. He made to lower her to the stretcher, and Leonie and Elizabeth both remembered the other motionless body, dark and heavy with water, and the tarpaulin that had wrapped it out of sight.
But May would not be made to lie down. Instead, the man set her gently on her feet and supported her with his arms. Ivy and John closed in on either side of her. May took one step forward and turned her face up to the sky.
‘She’s walking up the beach.’
Leonie smiled. The difference from the other one was so plain. Alexander had brought them the news before hurrying back to the beach, but to see her for themselves was the best reassurance. They put their arms around each other, and there were tears and relief at the same time.
Elizabeth took a folded handkerchief from her sleeve. She dried her eyes and looked around her. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen the garden look more beautiful than it does at this minute?’
And it was true that there was a luminosity in the early evening, which delineated every leaf and petal in an intricate arrangement of melting light and shadow.
Hannah said to Aaron, ‘They’re putting her in the truck now, with her father and sister. They’ll be taking her to the hospital, I guess, but she looks well enough to me.’
‘I’m glad of it,’ he answered with composure.
Hannah lingered on the porch for a while longer, watching the groups of people on the beach break up and turn away in their separate directions. Spencer and Alexander peeled away from Marty and Judith, and the two couples traced a V-shape across the shingle to their steps. In the middle a clump of Beams jostled around Marian’s bulk,
like tugs bringing a liner in to dock.
The slanting light was distinctly end-of-summer. Within a month the last visitors would be gone, and Pittsharbor and the deserted bluff would be ready for winter. Another year’s cold would be hard for Aaron to endure, but he wouldn’t agree to leave the place. He was held here by his memories, which were more vivid to him now than the pallid and painful constrictions of reality.
‘Fine evening,’ Hannah observed calmly as she came across and settled the pillows behind his head.
May was transferred from the truck that had brought her up from the beach to a waiting ambulance. Ivy and John and a police officer went with her. One of the paramedics gave her tiny sips of water as they rolled along the lane towards Pittsharbor. She begged for more in a cracked whisper, but he wouldn’t let her have it. Her lips were split by deep seams crusted with blood, and her tongue was dark and swollen. She wouldn’t let go of John and Ivy. John supported her in his arms and Ivy held on to her hand. John kept lowering his head so his mouth brushed against May’s hair.
Ivy wanted to smother her sister with love, to choke her and ram her throat full of it, so that if she ever vanished again she would at least take the certainty of it with her. And with another part of herself she wanted to vent her anger for the last hours, by hitting and hurting and clawing at her in a blaze of retaliation. She bit her own lip until it stung.
May opened her eyes. ‘It hurts. My hand.’
Ivy loosened her fingers. They were cramped with the intensity of her grip. Anger felt like a blowtorch burning in her chest. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so mad at you. I thought you were dead.’
The paramedic looked a warning at her. They were travelling faster now, gathering speed towards the hospital.
To her surprise May grinned, then winced at the pain from her split mouth. ‘I thought I was, too.’
‘Nowhere near,’ the paramedic said, ‘You’re a tough one, aren’t you?’
‘I’m glad I didn’t die.’
Beyond the tinted windows of the ambulance there were trees and rocks, and the striations of light and shadow, the real world. She had climbed up out of a dark place because she wanted to be back here again. The memory of the effort it had cost told her how much she had wanted it. She was not Doone, she was nothing like poor Doone or her melancholy predecessor. She felt a lightness, not just in her knocked head but all through herself, as if she had discarded a weight she had dragged about with her for much too long. She could see her sister’s chipped nail polish and the worn denim of her father’s Levis with intense clarity. The simplicity of it all was more precious than anything she had ever known.
They were all looking at her, the woman police officer and the paramedics, and John and Ivy. It dawned on her that she was more hurt than she realised. ‘I am all right,’ she said clearly. ‘I am quite all right. I didn’t want to be dead, like the others.’
The other world was there, but it was fading from her sight. The bigger and much darker mysteries were all about this one. She thought about Ali and Jack O’Donnell, and Marty, and Leonie, and Lucas, and the stories Elizabeth had told her. What people did and hid from one another and wished for in their hearts. Love and sex, longing and disappointment, those were the real secrets.
John stroked her hair. ‘Of course not,’ he soothed her. ‘Of course you didn’t.’
He thought, Oh God, if only Ali were here. He couldn’t be a mother to May, or to Ivy, and they needed her now. Ivy’s face was puckered with warring emotions, made almost ugly for once by the force of them. And the loneliness of the days and nights he had just endured suddenly unleashed itself. He found himself belatedly crying for his wife. Ivy saw it and shifted herself closer to him, and the three of them hung on to each other’s hands like an everlasting knot.
The ambulance turned on to the freeway and towards the hospital.
Marty and Judith reached the security of their house. For once Judith didn’t get busy immediately with Justine’s needs. Instead she challenged her husband. ‘You look terrible. What’s wrong?’
He shook his head, his mouth making a tremulous line.
‘I want to know,’ she insisted.
She planted her hands on his arms, shaking him. She was big and solid, and as seemingly imperturbable as one of her own sculptures, and the impulse grew within him to crack open and expose his failings to the solace of her massive calm. He could smell her familiar scent overlaid with the sour-sweet odour of baby. His mouth opened, choked with words.
‘Yes?’ Judith said. Her hair was slicked close to her skull, making her head and shoulders look like one rock balanced on another.
‘I did it,’ he said.
Her eyes widened a fraction, made blank with surprise.
‘I killed her.’
‘She isn’t dead, Marty. We just saw her off to hospital.’
‘Not her.’
‘Who, then?’
He could see the surprise overwhelmed by a leap of fear and apprehension. But the longing to tell, to relieve himself of the guilt by sharing it, had grown too strong to contain. ‘Doone. I killed her.’
Judith half turned to look at the baby in her chair, searching for reassurance in the sight. But then her gaze dragged back to Marty. The words couldn’t be unsaid, although she did her best to deflect them. ‘She drowned. It was an accident. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Because of me. It happened because of me. She said she wanted to die and she did. She was in love with me, more than just a kid’s crush. I let her, then I stopped her and she drowned.’
‘Wait.’
She came closer, so their faces were almost touching. A monumental composure overlaid the depth of her shocked reaction. ‘Are you sure you want me to hear this, whatever it is?’
Desperately he whispered, ‘Yes. Oh yes, please let me tell you. I can’t keep it in any longer.’ He tried to rest his head against her but she wouldn’t yield. He was like a child handing over his confession, waiting for the damage to be made better.
‘Go ahead then,’ Judith said.
Her expression never changed while he told the story and the words poured violently out of him. Spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth; he made little gestures of entrapment with his hands to catch and hold her, although she made no move away from him. Just once she turned her gaze to make sure that Justine was still happy in her chair, with her fat fists waving at a mobile suspended in front of her.
At the end he buried his face in his hands.
‘Is that it?’ Judith delivered the words coldly, wanting to empty her mouth of them.
‘Yes. I don’t know how I can expect you to understand, let alone forgive me. But I did put a stop to it, you know. I told her that there would be no more sailing together. There were going to be no more times alone with her. I … wanted to put things right, Judith. They’d gone wrong, yes. But I did what I could, at the end.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Her voice grew colder still. ‘Are you saying you interfered with her?’
‘No, Jesus, it wasn’t like that. I didn’t make love to her or anywhere near it, what do you think I am? She came on to me. But yeah, I did things I shouldn’t have done. It’s the age, Jude, that just on the brink between girl and woman time, neither one nor the other. It’s … intense.’ He looked wildly around, at the pleasant room and the doors still standing open to the view of silvery sea. ‘But I love you, for Chrissake. We were waiting for our baby to be born. I told her.’
At last Judith shook her head. ‘And so you think she killed herself for unrequited love of you?’
He hesitated now. A trap opened at his feet. ‘She was unbalanced. I think maybe she didn’t try to live. I think maybe that was it.’
‘You didn’t kill her.’ It was a flat statement. There was a reprieve in sight.
Even more hurriedly he said, ‘No, I think I see that now. Only the whole thing has been driven inside me. Yesterday and today there was the other girl, and we were out looking for h
er and all the horror of it came rushing back. I was out one day taking some photographs of Doone, quite innocently, and Spencer Newton saw me. He put a wrong construct on it, of course. But I think he and Alexander believed I might have had something to do with May’s disappearance. Which I didn’t, of course.’
‘Poor Doone,’ Judith said with sudden softness. ‘Poor little girl.’
‘Yes.’
‘Who else knows about this, Marty? Apart from Spencer and Alexander? People at the gallery, maybe? Up here at the beach?’
‘No one. I swear to God. Except for May herself. She found a diary, in Doone’s bedroom. And I was the only person she told about that.’
‘A diary. I see.’
Now Judith went to the window and looked out at the island. He followed her and rested his hands experimentally on her shoulders, feeling the reassuring pad of flesh on her back.
‘Don’t do that,’ Judith said in a clear voice.
‘Do what?’
‘Touch me.’
‘What do you mean? Judith, listen baby, I told you because I couldn’t bear to keep it from you any longer, because you deserve better than …’
‘Don’t try to justify it to me. Don’t ask me to share the responsibility for what you did.’ She had already moved away. With shaking hands she was putting notebooks and work materials into her black holdall, moving quickly and distractedly, betraying her feelings at last.
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded in disbelief.
‘What do you think? You don’t expect me to stay, do you? I’m taking Justine in the car. We’re going back to the apartment. I’ll take advice, you must make your own arrangements. Don’t stand there, blocking my way.’
He was amazed. ‘You’re just shocked, I’m not surprised, but you mustn’t be so harsh. You can’t walk out on me. I’m not Tom Beam.’
‘You’re right. You are much worse than Tom Beam.’
‘Wait. What about Justine?’
