Moon Island

by Rosie Thomas

  Sometimes just the knowledge, the memory of it does make me feel so strong. Like I could hike up the highest mountain or live alone on a deserted island – oh, an island – just with this for food and drink and warmth and company.

  And if I’m truthful there are other times when I doubt it all. All the wishing and waiting. Miss Straight-A says in my head, who are you kidding?

  But it’s easy to quieten her. And the easiness makes me sure that I’m real and what I have experienced is real.

  And then I feel happy.

  After that there was a long sequence of numbers, scribbled and jumbled close together so that the hasty digits were barely legible. They looked as if they had been written in high passion.

  Because May read too quickly she sometimes missed the sense, so she went back and made herself study each line. After a while she yawned, and the yawn caught in the back of her throat and swelled into a greasy surge of nausea.

  She realised that the diary frightened her.

  It was the combination that was unnerving. The way the accounts of normal everyday experiences were linked by the fierce jumbles of numbers to the passages of declaration. And Doone’s declarations of strength made her uneasy. If she was so strong and happy, why did she keep writing it down and why did what she wrote make her sound so lonely? What secret was hidden in the numbers?

  May looked at them again. They were usually groups of three, sometimes only two. Once or twice the same number or similar ones occurred several times close together, but otherwise there was no apparent link or pattern. If it was a code, she had no idea how to break it. The thought of what the numbers might spell out increased the sick pressure so that May wondered if she might actually vomit. Holding her legs tensed against the chair’s worn slipcover she closed the book and waited.

  Slowly the nausea subsided, but she couldn’t get Doone’s words out of her head. I could never tell. I could live on a desert island with nothing but this for food and warmth and company. It made her sound so isolated. And yet, May thought, I know her. This bed was where she had slept. From the window she had looked at the view of the island and had gone out and drowned in the blue water.

  Somehow, with her diary and her introspection and her coded secrets – and her loneliness – Doone Bennison was slipping under her skin. Now that the knowledge of her was there, hooked in beneath the surface, May did not know how she might rid herself of it. She remembered how finding the diary had made her feel that she hugged the secret to herself like a shield.

  Perhaps I’m like her, she thought. As if she were looking down from some vantage point up under the cracked ceiling, she saw herself sitting splay-legged in the old chair, with the closed diary in her lap and the chair wedged up close against the door to keep out intruders. Or, maybe, was it Doone she was seeing and not herself at all?

  ‘I would tell my mother,’ May said. The words sounded startlingly loud in the enclosed room. ‘I wish I could tell her.’

  One grey, sleet-filled afternoon in the weeks after Alison’s death, driven by an impulse she didn’t understand, May had gone to the boxes where John had stored her clothes. She had taken out the dresses and jackets one by one and cut them, making long tattered ribbons, with the kitchen shears. ‘See?’ she had angrily demanded as she did it. ‘Do you see what I’m doing?’

  She hadn’t expected her mother to hear the question, or to be hurt by the destruction of her clothes. Nor had the frenzy been a relief, only another shame to add to the ones May was suffering already.

  The therapist John took her to see after this episode had advised May to search for something in nature that reminded her of her mother, and to look at it and think about her when she felt overwhelmed by grief or anger. Reluctantly May had chosen a tree, one particular tall, graceful tree, which grew in a little park near to their house, and in a way the strategy had worked. She thought of it secretly as Mom’s tree and tried in a stilted way to address her mother through it. Now she felt a sudden urge to run out and put her arms around the rough trunk.

  There didn’t seem to be much variety in the trees around here. They were mostly hostile pointed firs.

  May jumped to her feet and the diary fell to the floor. She shoved it back into the hole and clumsily wedged the skirting back in place, then pulled the chair away from the door. She didn’t have to trap herself in this room. Ivy was with Lucas but she could try her father. There were enough reasons why she didn’t usually turn to him, but she dismissed those for this moment.

  May ran down the steep stairs. As her head came below the upper floor level she saw that he had come in from tennis; he was in the kitchen with Leonie Beam. The corners of the room were thrown into deeper shadow by the slices of light that angled from the windows. Dust specks floated in the sunlight, making the old beams and the blackened hearthstones seem darker and heavier.

  John was making coffee in the old-fashioned percolator. Leonie was leaning against one of the counters. She was wearing white tennis shorts and shoes, and her long legs were crossed at the ankles. Both of them looked up at May in momentary surprise and smiled at her.

  ‘Hi,’ John said. ‘I wondered where you were. We had a good game, Leonie and I won both sets.’

  Her smooth dark hair was damp, sticking to her forehead, and his shirt was darkened in a great patch across his chest. The two of them were smiling in exactly the same way – the neutral way that covered up other things. May had interrupted something.

  ‘Do you play tennis, May?’ asked Leonie.

  ‘No. I can’t think of anything more boring.’

  ‘May …’ John began, but she didn’t wait to hear him out. She marched across to the porch screen and slammed it open, leaving it gaping behind her.

  After a second’s awkward silence Leonie gently closed the screen again. She took the mug of coffee that John handed to her.

  ‘Sorry,’ John said shortly.

  ‘No need.’

  The child had materialised like some avenging angel. Her eyes had skewered them both, as if she could have uttered something much worse than mild rudeness. But her reaction at the sight of them had been so quick that Leonie knew jealousy was a familiar feeling for her. John must have plenty of girlfriends. Not surprising, she thought with resignation.

  ‘May didn’t like Suzanne, the woman I was involved with until recently. Neither did Ivy, really, although it mattered less to her.’

  ‘I see,’ Leonie said. She sat down at the over-large oak table and looked through the window at the pillars of the porch and the sky, waiting for what he would say next.

  Out on the deck May hesitated, blinking in the brightness, remembering the people down on the beach and her sister’s golden limbs twined around Lucas’s. There was no going back into the house either, so she slipped down the dank space that separated the Captain’s House from Elizabeth Newton’s garden. She moved quickly, because Elizabeth might be working with her pruning shears again amid the thick greenery. She didn’t want to talk to Elizabeth now, or even to be seen by her.

  There was no way to go but round to the road side of the house. There was a path and dogwood bushes, and the open patch of grass and stones where John left the car. The Pittsharbor lane petered out here at the Captain’s House, the last building on the bluff.

  May wandered slowly along the road. She hesitated at the sound of a car and saw a black Lexus coming round the bend. She thought it must be more members of the endless Beam family arriving, but the car slowed before their driveway and turned towards the house that stood between theirs and the Fennymores’.

  The name on the mailbox was Stiegel. The occupants of the car were a couple, quite young. May waited in the shelter of the hedge. The car drew up at the door and the man got out. He had dark curly hair and wore smart New York clothes; a pink Ralph Lauren button-down shirt and polished shoes. There was a thick gold band on his wedding finger; she saw the light catch it as he opened the rear door of the car and unbuckled a baby seat. He swung the seat into the
air, using two hands, as if it were a prize he had just been awarded. There was a fat, impassive-looking baby strapped into it. ‘Here we are,’ the man cooed into the baby’s face, ‘here we are at last. Was it a long way for her? A long way in the nasty car?’

  The woman had got out too. She was big, May saw, and swathed in those no-colour linen clothes that some people try to hide their size inside. ‘Come on, open up the house, Marty,’ she said. ‘You know she needs her feed.’

  Marty handed the baby over to her and ran up the steps to the door, tugging a bunch of keys out of a slim leather bag. He fumbled, then unlocked the door. He pushed it open and held it for the woman, who walked by with the baby lifted aloft in its seat. They all disappeared inside, but a minute later the man reemerged and began taking heavy bags from the trunk of the Lexus. May slipped out of her hiding-place and walked on aimlessly.

  The Fennymores’ house was smaller than the other four. It was a plain box but the steep pitched roof and low windows made it look hunched, even forbidding. There was no suggestion of a garden, only a piece of open ground where their old tan station-wagon stood next to a dilapidated shed. Shading the car and the shed was a big tree. It had pale, almost silvery bark and branches like the fingers of an elegant woman’s hand. A sweep of leaves looked like the layers of a skirt.

  May hardly knew one tree from the next, but she thought this one might be a kind of birch or maybe beech. It wasn’t exactly the same as the one in the park she called Mom’s tree, but it was quite similar. On an impulse she left the road and went to it. She rested the flat of her hand against the smooth, sun-warmed bark, then tipped her head forward so that her forehead touched it.

  Alison had been tall and elegant like the tree. The rustling skirt of leaves was like one she had brought with her when she moved from England to New York in 1970. Alison had been a student of American history and part of her degree course had been a year at Columbia. She had met John Duhane sitting on a bench at the Frick and had stayed to marry him.

  The skirt was made of watery tie-dyed cheesecloth, sea-green and jade, with a handkerchief-point hem sewn with tiny emerald beads. The beads had rolled and scattered as the scissor blades sliced the cheesecloth into tatters. Once, long before that, May had implored Alison to let her dress up in the skirt. She had worn it to a fancy dress party as a sea nymph and Alison had plaited green ribbons for seaweed in her hair.

  May pressed her face against the bark of the new tree, but she couldn’t conjure up any words, for her mother or for anyone else. Instead, her shoulders heaved and her face contorted. She rolled and scraped her forehead against the tree as the tears came.

  Aaron Fennymore had been in the shed, chiselling a new dowel to replace a split one from one of the old chairs. Hannah had been asking him for weeks to do it, and today he had felt enough of a lick of energy to attempt a job that once would have taken a matter of minutes. It was slow work now; the wood slipped in the vice and the mallet had grown almost too heavy to lift.

  He saw the girl as soon as she walked in from the lane. He frowned at the sight of her, then stood with the mallet in one hand and the chisel in the other as she stretched out her arms to embrace a tree trunk. He let his spectacles slide down his nose. Old age had made him long-sighted and he could see the child’s face squeezed with suffering. Gently, he put down the tools.

  She didn’t hear the creak of the shed door or his slow footsteps. When he asked, ‘Can I help?’ she leapt backwards, hand to her mouth to stifle a scream. ‘It’s all right,’ Aaron said.

  May rubbed her eyes and nose with the back of her hand. They stood looking at each other, not sure what to say next.

  ‘Are you in trouble?’

  She shook her head, sniffing. ‘Sorry. I’m in your garden.’

  ‘Yes. I was going to chase you away with my big stick.’ He held up his knobbled walking stick. ‘But I can’t hardly do that if you’re crying, can I?’

  May had been afraid of this old man when she had seen him at the Beams’. Now, closer up, he was a little less formidable. There were silvery fans of lines around his deep-set eyes and the hand resting on the knob of his stick shook uncontrollably. Even so, he did not look particularly benign.

  ‘Come inside.’

  She would have made an excuse if it had been more of an invitation and less of an order. Instead she followed him into the frowning house.

  The door opened into a little wood-panelled lobby hung with thick old curtains that smelt of dust. May imagined that the Fennymores would need all the draught insulation possible during the winters they spent alone up here on the bluff. Aaron held open a door for her, and she passed through into the middle of the house.

  There was just one big room. Around three of the walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves made of thick, rough timber and the shelves were filled with dim-looking books. On the small spaces of wall that weren’t covered with books there were framed maps, and old brown-toned photographs behind glass, and little nests of smaller shelves made to display bits of what looked like carved bone. Against one wall there was a big wood-burning stove, with a chimney alcove stacked with cut logs. The seaward windows looked out at the bay and the island, but the curtains that framed them cut out a lot of the sparkling light. The room smelt of woodsmoke like the Captain’s House, and musty book bindings and old people.

  May wanted to wander around and stare at the thick deposits of things, but felt too wary of Aaron Fennymore. Instead she glanced sidelong at a small table near at hand, where a vaguely spoon-shaped piece of the bone material was laid out like an ornament. It was an ugly yellowy-cream colour and she noticed now that it was minutely carved. Without thinking she picked it up. The carvings were patterns of tiny leaves and flowers.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ Aaron demanded, making her jump.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘It’s scrimshaw.’ Seeing that meant nothing to her either, he snapped, ‘Where have you spent your life?’

  ‘New York City.’

  ‘Well, then your ignorance is hardly surprising.’

  He hobbled over to a chair beside the stove and sat down, pointing to another seat opposite it. May obediently took her place, wondering how she was going to escape. The room and its crammed contents were overpowering rather than fascinating. Aaron took another of the yellowy carvings in his hand and gently turned it in his fingers. His fingernails were almost the same colour, thickened and horny. May looked away.

  ‘Imagine you are a hand on one of the old whaling ships. Away from home for years at a time, at sea for months on end. You live in the forecastle with the other hands, a space not much wider than this.’ Aaron pointed the fragment of scrimshaw, indicating an area of a few square feet. ‘And your berth and sea chest are the only space you can call your own. It’s the middle of a windless day somewhere near the Equator, and the sun’s so hot and so high overhead you think your little ship’s the centre of its burning eye. What do you do with yourself, eh? What’s your name?’

  ‘May,’ she said quietly. The picture he conjured up for her was so vivid that it interested her, even though she didn’t want it to. ‘I suppose I might read a book, or write a letter to my family.’

  ‘And suppose you’d never learned to read or write properly? You might just scratch your name to a contract of hire, no more than that.’

  ‘They’re sailors’ carvings, aren’t they?’

  He gave a sharp nod of satisfaction. ‘They are. They took the materials they had plenty of, pieces of whale bone or tooth, and they carved them like this. They took their carvings home as presents for their wives or sweethearts, or they sold them for a few cents on shore. What do you think of them now?’

  She looked again at the tiny whorls and fluted cavities, which with their unwholesome colour now made her think of inner-ear parts, or fragments of joint that would have been better left covered by merciful flesh. ‘I think they’re kind o
f sad.’ So much time taken, so much skill lavished.

  Aaron’s face tightened into vertical grooves as he regarded her. To her relief he only said, ‘Yes. Maybe that’s why I like them.’

  ‘Can I look at the pictures?’ May indicated the old brown photographs. There was a noise out on the deck and Hannah Fennymore opened the porch door.

  ‘If it’s history you’re interested in, you should ask my wife to tell you some stories. Hannah the historian, she knows all about Pittsharbor and Maine. I’ve been talking to our neighbour about scrimshaw, Hannah. I found her out the back of the house making friends with the tree.’

  Hannah put down a bucket which left a sandy ring on the floorboards. It was half-filled with clams; the Fennymores had clam beds on the portion of beach fronting their house. For fifty years Aaron had rowed out to his lobster traps, too, but now he was too infirm to handle the boat. May remembered that Elizabeth Newton had talked about all this in one of their conversations about Moon Island Beach. She had only half listened then but her interest stirred properly now.

  In her clamming boots and thick brown jacket Hannah looked more than ever like some unshowy little bird. Both the Fennymores wore several layers of clothes even though the day was warm, and May wondered again how and why they lived out here all the winter through.

  ‘Historian? Hardly. No letters after my name. Aaron, haven’t you offered your friend a drink or something to eat?’

  May stood up quickly. ‘I have to go anyway.’

  ‘Come again,’ Hannah said, pleasantly enough. ‘Aaron likes to talk about his collections. Doone Bennison, poor Doone, used to come and listen sometimes.’

  ‘Did she?’ There was an edgy note of curiosity in May’s voice.

  ‘Once in a while.’

  ‘What was she like?’

  The two old faces turned to her. They were of an age to have grown to look alike, even though Aaron’s features were much sharper and stronger than his wife’s.

  ‘She was a lonely little thing,’ Hannah said at length. ‘But I used to think it was by choice. She didn’t spend much time with the other children, the Beams and the local kids. It was as if she didn’t have time for them. I lent her a couple of books to read, I thought she might enjoy them if she spent so much time on her own. Sam and Jennifer Bennison sent them back afterwards, after she died.’