by Rosie Thomas
At last he shook his head, as though he were trying to clear it of some persistent dream. He reached out with cold fingers and turned the ignition key. The engine fired and he eased the car slowly forward. Like an automaton, he drove on towards New York.
Sixteen
He descended the steps very slowly, placing one foot in front of the other with extreme deliberation. Every facet of the beach was grey in the early light: wet grey shingle, sullen water and long lines of breakers setting up a dull, continuous roar. Aaron reached the bottom of the steps and began to shuffle, leaning heavily on his stick. Gulls rose in an arc ahead of him, wheeling away from the storm debris at the high-water mark. He watched them as they soared against the clouded sky. His own progress was painful but still he lifted his head, a flicker of exhilaration within him fuelled by the scoured air. It was his beach, in all of its moods, but he loved it best when it was wild and inhospitable like this.
He had planned this morning’s expedition with great care, thinking of it as a break-out, and hoarding the energy and determination he knew he would need. Hannah couldn’t keep watch over him for ever and sure enough she had gone out to Pittsharbor for an hour to buy supplies. He was irritable that the slow traverse of the bluff and the steps was taking so long, but it was also illogical to be concerned about the time. He had made no arrangement, even though he might have picked up the telephone – that had never been his way – but he still nursed the hope that she would come, as she had done long ago.
The high-water mark was a tangle of wrack and line and shreds of garbage. He leaned on his stick to catch his breath, stirring the black fronds of weed with the toe of his boot. And when he looked up again she was walking to meet him. Her coat was wrapped about her and there was a scarf around her head. Sixty years had left her unmarked.
She reached his side. The surf was loud, but he heard her voice as clearly as if they had broken off their old conversation only an hour ago. ‘I was watching the beach,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I woke up this morning and I knew you’d be here.’
She had told him exactly the same at the very beginning, when she evaded her mother and came down to meet him between the fishing boats. There was a difference about the beach today, an iridescence in the light and a full-throated cadence to the sound of the sea, which reminded her of those days. She felt as light as a girl. They turned together and began to walk slowly along the crescent of the beach, just out of reach of the foam-lipped waves as they ran out into the shingle.
‘I am here,’ Aaron confirmed.
The Captain’s House and the Stiegels’ were closed and shuttered. He pointed up to them. ‘Gone back where they belong. You’ll be next, won’t you? You and Marian.’
She knew him so well. The distance of the years had telescoped, leaving only the mirage of time, which had ravaged their faces and seamed their skin. It was all a comedy, Elizabeth thought. She wanted to laugh, overtaken suddenly by the happiness of acceptance. There was nothing left for Aaron or for her to fight against. All their lives were embedded in the beach. They were no more than a comedy and an illusory ship, which seemed to carry the grains of tragedy away with it. Her eye was caught by the glimmer of a very small double shell lying among the pebbles. She stooped to retrieve it and examined the tiny gradations of rose-pink and pearl and silver. It was like a pair of baby’s fingernails. She held it in the palm of her hand, then tipped it gently back into the sea. All this she did while Aaron took a slow step and another.
‘Back to Boston, for the winter?’ She thought about it for a moment. Back to her bridge evenings and choral society, and good concerts, and the company of a few remaining friends she had known for most of her life. ‘Yes. Marian and me, one, then the other. The way it always has been.’ Acceptance, Elizabeth thought. The final achievement, to accept what was not susceptible to change.
‘They all think I’m going to die.’
‘It doesn’t look that way to me.’ She smiled at him, flirting, a girl again.
‘I’ll do it when I’m good and ready.’
‘Just as you always did.’
They walked on, another handful of steps. Elizabeth sensed that he was tiring now. She touched her hand to his arm, not quite connecting with his sleeve, just indicating that they should stop. They faced out, looking across to the island. The little beach was laced with driftwood. ‘I saw the Captain’s ship last night.’
He laughed, a sharp snort eloquent with a young man’s derision.
‘Little May Duhane saw it too, and Leonie Beam, although she didn’t know it for what it was,’ Elizabeth said.
Aaron’s dismissive laugh was a contradiction. His face had darkened with exhaustion. It was an effort for him to make a half-turn and begin the chain of steps that would take him back to his chair beside the stove. He was glad of Elizabeth beside him, her arm close to his, separated by a chink of air. They passed between the Beams’ sailing boat, swinging on its mooring line, and one of the rowboats pulled up high on the beach.
‘Do you remember?’ Elizabeth asked softly.
Once, one night before they learned to break into the Captain’s House, they had crept together beneath the shelter of an upturned dory. The smell of fish gut and tar and salt was the same as the scent of today.
‘I remember. Did you imagine otherwise?’
His sharpness pleased her. Of course he had not forgotten. They moved on, even more slowly, to the Fennymores’ house. Ahead were the public steps. Aaron stopped again and took a long look, from the Captain’s House up to the square façade of his own and on to the breadth of land that lay beyond it. Without warning tears beaded at the corners of his eyes and ran down his face. He muttered an inaudible syllable and bent his head, and when Elizabeth moved to comfort him he bit at her, ‘Just leave me be.’
‘What is it?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Weakness.’
‘You aren’t weak. You were never that. Impatient and inexorable and angry, but never weak.’
He lifted his chin. His neck was thin and yellow, roped with sinews. ‘She’ll be back soon.’
He would mount the steps again and shuffle back to his chair, and Hannah would resume her vigil over him.
‘So I’ll say goodbye, Aaron. I’m going back to the city in a day or two, after I’ve closed up the house.’
He inclined his head, his involuntary tears already drying. They had not even touched hands. The winter lay ahead of them, a passage of ascending stairs of ice and vortices of wind, and they both knew it was an obstacle too great for Aaron to want to negotiate yet another time. ‘Until next summer,’ he said.
‘Next summer,’ she answered, keeping her voice level.
He did not want an avowal of any kind and nor did she. They had adopted a different way, for all of their adult lives. She brushed his cheek with her mouth, so briefly that it was only the ghost of a kiss. She was already moving away, her hand lifted, when he murmured, ‘Wait.’
She halted at once, watching his face and wondering.
‘Don’t let your boy put his houses up there,’ he ordered. After I am gone.
‘He doesn’t own the land, Aaron. He can’t build there.’
‘If Hannah sells.’
After I am gone, she might not think it worth holding on. She may weaken and give way.
Long ago Elizabeth had disappointed him, and in retaliation Aaron had fought hard for his place on the bluff. He had kept it out of pride. She understood what it meant, but she didn’t want to make a promise she couldn’t keep. The sea made its admonition at her back and the sea-birds turned in circles over the land. But the acquiescent lightness of the morning didn’t desert her. She knew the decision she should make. At last she said, ‘Spencer can’t buy anything without my money.’ Aaron’s eyes held hers. ‘He won’t have it, not until after my death.’
While she remained then, the bluff would be as they had known it together, in their separation.
He nodded and kissed her in his turn, the same dry, fleeting
touch. Without another word he began the slow climb of the stairs and Elizabeth walked the beach. Neither of them looked back again. Nor did either of them notice they were being watched.
Marian was up on the widow’s walk at the top of her house. She had seen the two of them come from their opposite directions and their slow walk together to the water’s edge, and she had read the depth of their absorption in one another. Now she followed Aaron’s painful ascent and the hesitant steps across the rough ground to his porch. Elizabeth was lost in her own thoughts; she didn’t look up to see Marian’s bulk penned in by the fancy ironwork and silhouetted against the pearl-grey sky.
Seventeen
The letter from Chicago arrived almost by return of post. May found it waiting for her one afternoon when she came home from school. She left the white envelope on the table while she switched on the TV, fixed herself a sandwich, and sat down in front of it with her plate and a glass of Diet Coke. She ate half of the cottage cheese on rye before replacing the bitten chunk squarely on the plate. Then she took her knife and deliberately licked it clean before slitting open the envelope.
The letter was handwritten, on thick creamy paper headed Jennifer Bennison MD. The script was small and fairly legible. May read it slowly, taking in each word.
Dear May.
Thank you for sending Doone’s book to me. I knew she kept a diary, but we had thought she must have destroyed it.
I am very glad to have this much of her, and to be able to understand some of her thoughts and feelings before she died. The rest of it, which I cannot decipher, will have to remain a partial secret. At least I know and understand a little more about what preoccupied her in those last days. I also know that nothing will change what actually happened, nor will recrimination or bitterness bring our daughter back to us again.
She was much loved by both of us, although it is one of the characteristics of adolescence not to recognise parental love, or to reject it, or to believe that it is in some way not enough. In this sense Doone was an ordinary girl, but she was also one who was capable of rising to extraordinary passions.
We miss her in every moment of every day.
Thank you again for returning her diary.
With best wishes for the future,
Jennifer Bennison.
May folded the letter carefully and put it next to her plate. She rested her hands on the table, palms down, and waited for the rush of feelings to subside.
It was not her secret to reveal.
Voyages of the Dolphin was not her book, it belonged to Hannah Fennymore, and all the connections to Sarah Corder and the Captain’s House belonged to Moon Island and the beach and the summer, a long way from where she was now.
None of them was her secret, she was only an onlooker. She had stumbled on the diary and its key. The only other interpretation was that there was a link beyond the real world, which she couldn’t and wouldn’t understand, not now, sitting at the table in the apartment with her school bag and the faces soundlessly mouthing from the TV on the counter.
She wouldn’t tell Mrs Bennison that she had broken Doone’s code. Nor would she reveal what she knew about Marty Stiegel to anyone. Doone had hidden these things away and May did not believe that it was for her to disinter them. The ship had sailed out of the bay, carrying the rest of the secrets with it.
These things May was certain of, as far as certainty belonged with the cloaking fogs and stormy seascapes of Pittsharbor. It wasn’t thinking of the beach and its blurred dimensions that disturbed her: it was the letter itself. She picked it up and read it again, although the words were already etched in her mind.
Jealousy, that was what it made her feel, jealousy that crawled up and pinched her with its iron-hard fingers. She was jealous of a dead girl because her mother loved her …
She didn’t even like the sound of Jennifer Bennison; the letter made her seem superior and cold, although she used the right words and what she said was no doubt true. But she had loved Doone, that much was plain. She hadn’t died and gone away, she had stayed to miss her daughter in every minute of every day, not the other way round.
May got up from the table, pushing back her chair so that it scraped noisily. The phone rang at the same instant; she listened to Laurie from her class leave a message on the machine. Then, with silence for company again, she walked through the apartment to her father’s bedroom, which had once also been her mother’s. She went to the closet where Ali’s clothes used to hang and opened the door to empty space. A few naked hangers bracketed the rail.
May walked into the closet and closed the door behind her. She hunched her shoulders against the wall and the hangers rattled as she slid to squat on her haunches, then lowered herself to the floor. She could hear the trickling sand of silence in her inner ear and the darkness swarmed with colours behind her closed eyes. By breathing in hard she thought she could detect Ali’s perfume.
There were no clothes. There was nothing left in which to wrap herself, nothing to tear or destroy. There was only silence and space, and herself.
The absurdity, the saving absurdity of it, squeezed a sudden laugh out of her throat, something between a cough and a gasp. ‘Jesus,’ May said aloud. ‘What kind of a person am I?’ She sounded like Ivy, she realised, and also like Ali herself.
The closet was dusty. Dust collected in the back of her throat and nose, and she sneezed, then let her head sink forward to rest on her knees. It was also warm and airless and comforting. Closet womb, May thought. Womb closet. Safety, claustrophobia, safety. The words ran round in her head until they lost their meaning and made a chain of soothing syllables, and she drifted into a doze.
She was startled awake again by John’s voice. He was calling her name through the apartment. She scrambled upright and hit her head against the clothes rail, setting the hangers clashing together. She elbowed the door open, stepped into the airy room and saw her father standing amazed in the bedroom doorway.
May looked back at where she had burst out from. ‘I took a nap in the closet,’ she explained.
It was funny enough to make them laugh until the dust turned May’s laughter into a coughing fit, which made her eyes water.
‘Come on. Come through here with me,’ John said. He led her into the living-room and sat her down on the sofa. He turned on the lamps at either end of it because the room was dim. Then he sat beside her and drew her close, so that her head was beneath his chin. ‘I was worried,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you were only napping in the closet, not lost.’
‘Not lost,’ she repeated comfortably.
‘Where’s Ivy?’
‘With Steve, or somewhere.’
‘Will you mind being on your own so much more, when she’s gone to college?’
It was only a few days away now.
‘No. As long as you’re here.’
‘We’ll be good together. What were you really doing in your mom’s closet?’
‘I was looking for her.’ She would show him Jennifer Bennison’s letter, but not now.
‘She’s gone, May.’ There was exasperation as well as sadness in his voice.
‘I know that.’
The place where they were sitting, the settee and the fuzzy glow of lamplight, called to mind the other picture. May examined it in her head, trying not to flinch. It wasn’t merely banal, as she had earlier decided because she was trying to ape her sister. The pin-sharpness of the recovered memory was already fading, but she thought that the contrasts of it, light and shadow falling on interlocked bodies, brutal exposure and implicit shamefulness, would always stay with her. Her mother, caught in the act of love-making with a man who wasn’t her father. ‘Did she hurt you so much by what she did with Jack O’Donnell? Is that why we never talked about her after she died?’
John didn’t pull away, as she had half expected he might. He held her loosely, went on breathing with his mouth against her hair. ‘I loved your mother very much. I always loved her, from the first day I saw her sittin
g on a bench in the Frick with her tatty, brilliant clothes and that wild hair like a light was shining on her head. She was what I wanted, there was never another question for me after that day.
‘Almost as soon as we were married I felt I wasn’t enough for her and so she had to go looking for something more. The lack in me of whatever it was she needed, colour or strength or comedy, or maybe just sex, May, or most probably a mix of all those things and a few dozen others, made me feel guilty, and guilt makes you shrivel up, and you lose your courage and your sense of direction.
‘I wasn’t surprised when I found out about her affairs and if they had made her happy maybe it would all have been endurable. Not okay, but endurable. But she wasn’t happy either, she always seemed disappointed, not just in me but in everything. Except when she was with you and Ivy. The two of you gave her an anchor, which I never could and no one else ever did.
‘I didn’t expect her to die. She was the last person anyone could imagine it happening to, because she was so strong. She was like a tree or a river.’
May stirred. Ali wasn’t a tree or a river or anything of the kind. Dr Metz was wrong there too. She was my mother. But she let it pass, accepting that it was his right to interpret her in one way, just as it was hers to differ.
John clicked his fingers, a hard dry snap. ‘It happened so suddenly. Immediately her absence was so entire and so absolute.’
It was, May thought. Entirely absolute.
‘We had never really talked about what her affairs meant. About why she needed to do it. I always thought we would confront the truth next week, the next time she made it too obvious, the next time she had no explanation to offer. Then she died and it was as though she had just turned to me, with that sharp look of amusement on her face as if she was about to say something important, and I knew I would never hear what it was.
‘I should have been able to talk instead to you and Ivy, but I couldn’t. What I felt was … ashamed.’ The word drifted and fell between them, as softly as a goose-feather settling.
