LITMIR.BIZ

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lay unwieldy on her tongue. ‘But I couldn’t. I had all the tests. The problem was me, not Tom. We tried the … the alternative methods. Quite a lot were undignified, most of them painful, all of them were expensive. None worked. I sound sorry for myself, don’t I?’

      John listened, but said nothing.

      ‘We were told to consider adoption, but Tom didn’t want to do that. He felt it wasn’t right for him. So. No children.’

      ‘I’m sorry, I made a clumsy mistake.’

      ‘Don’t be. I said, it was natural enough. I’m spilling all this out probably because … because of the wine.’

      Laughter and the splash of oars travelled across the water to them. Two boats were making their way out to the island.

      ‘Why don’t you and Tom take your vacations somewhere else?’

      She was taken aback for a moment. The question leapfrogged further than she had been prepared for. ‘Oh, it’s a movie, isn’t it? The beach, the island… that house, Maine itself. It’s woven into all of them, a picture, that was what Marian wanted. It’s her oeuvre. Family, grandchildren, the tradition of all the summers. Tom wouldn’t consider cutting us out of the celluloid.’

      ‘Not even for your sake?’

      Leonie considered in all seriousness, wishing to do her husband justice. At length she said, ‘No.’ It was the truth; it was so important to Tom that the two of them should remain part of this extended family. The connection compensated him for the lack of his own children, even as comparisons deepened the sense of loss and failure for her. ‘It isn’t so much to ask, you know. It’s just a summer vacation. Some tennis, a couple of barbecues. Aunt Leonie and Uncle Tom. In the winter we go on a ski trip, usually with friends. Last year we went to the Caribbean …’

      She knew that she protested too much. It was part of a contract she had agreed with herself, to be as positive as she could manage. There seemed no way, any more, to give expression to the desperation and craving and sense of futility that were all her body did manage to breed. At the beginning, in the first years, she had talked – ranted, sobbed – to Tom about her longing to conceive. But now, driven into blankness, they hardly ever even mentioned it. Except maybe as the bitterest, the most oblique of jokes at their joint expense.

      Although she had told John Duhane the bare facts, Leonie couldn’t have conveyed to him or anyone else how it felt to hold Ashton or Sidonie in her arms. The simultaneous longings to smother them, to inhale the scent of their skin and hair to the point of narcolepsy, to hurl them aside, to rake and pummel her own disobliging flesh… I’m crazy, Leonie thought. Raving. There’s no hope for me… She grinned in the darkness. There was relief in acknowledging her madness.

      An onshore breeze had sprung up, and it blew a hank of hair across her face and flattened her skirt against her thighs. Being at the beach made her crazier, being inundated with babies and pounded by teenagers and chewed up by the clan of Beams, up here where everything was so god-damn clean and healthy and salt-scoured and plain … at least back in the city there was dirt and confusion, and work, and even a couple of women friends who had elected not to have babies …

      She laughed now, a low noise that made John look sideways at her tucked-in face. ‘Something funny?’

      He touched her wrist, guided her around a mooring chain snaked over the shingle. She resisted an impulse to take his hand.

      ‘In a way. Tell me about your girls.’ She wanted to ask about his wife.

      ‘They’re growing up.’

      ‘They would do, in the end.’

      They reached the far point of the beach, where the steps led up towards the Pittsharbor road. Leonie had the sense that John was also thinking of Doone Bennison, who had not grown up in the end.

      Which was worse, she wondered, for the thousandth time, to have had a child and lost her, or never to have had one at all? She didn’t know, any more than she had known on the afternoon a year ago when the fisherman brought Doone’s body ashore. She had been there, with a brown bag of shopping and a quart of ice-cream from the Ice Parlour. There had been a flurry down at the dock and one of the men had run forward with a tarpaulin and another had dashed along the harbour wall to the wooden hut where there was a telephone. At the same time there had been a hideous silence, and all the running and hoisting and sluicing of water had seemed to take place in slow motion. They had lifted the body, laid her on the dock and covered her over. Leonie remembered the white hands and feet.

      The breeze off the water was cold now. Leonie and John turned and began to retrace their slow steps along the tide-line.

      ‘I miss their smaller selves,’ John said. ‘Even after Ali died, I was certain I could look after them. Now I don’t believe I know anything. They think I’m the enemy.’

      ‘You said that before. I’m sure it isn’t true.’

      She had seen the girls, she wasn’t sure of anything of the sort. But you reassured parents about their children, didn’t you? That she was uncertain even of that much made Leonie aware how useless she had become around the whole business. Parents, procreation. Cut off from the chain of heredity, except via aunthood. What was there to do? she wondered. What, exactly?

      Out on the island beach two tongues of fire made wavering figures that were answered by fainter reflections in the water. They stopped walking, stood still to watch. The fire torches dipped and a third flame sprang up between them. The young were lighting a bonfire.

      ‘Looks kind of fun. Do you think they’ll be okay out there?’ John asked.

      ‘The kids row or windsurf or sail across all the time. The beach on this side is safe enough and there’s not much to go over the top of the island for. A lot of thick scrub, rough ground. Once there was a whalers’ retreat out there and a Native American settlement before that. Plenty of legends about it.’

      ‘Tell me one.’

      ‘Ask Hannah Fennymore. She’s the local historian.’

      John took this to mean that Leonie didn’t care enough for the place to absorb its history herself. They resumed their walk.

      At the foot of the Beams’ steps Leonie said, ‘Come and have a cup of coffee. Or another drink.’ The thought of going in on her own was not inviting. She felt a connection to this man and wanted to hold on to it.

      ‘Perhaps another evening,’ John said politely. He was half turned towards the island, listening to the murmur of breaking waves.

      ‘Do you play tennis?’

      ‘Yes. Not quite championship standard.’

      ‘Good. Come and play. I need a partner, Tom’s too competitive. Marian likes to see a family tournament.’

      ‘I’m sure she does.’

      They allowed themselves a moment’s sly amusement Oh, God, an ally, Leonie thought. I need an ally so badly.

      ‘Goodnight. Will you thank Marian for me?’

      ‘Of course.’ She went up the steps and left John to cross the remaining expanse of shingle to the Captain’s House.

      The Fennymores were preparing to leave. Aaron leaned heavily on his stick with Hannah guiding him. When Marian kissed them both, Aaron submitted to her.

      ‘You’ll come again? You won’t let the whole summer go by this year?’

      ‘Time doesn’t mean as much as it once did, Marian.’ Aaron’s voice was deep and hoarse, as if it cost him an effort to propel the air from his chest.

      ‘All the more reason,’ she answered, patting his hand as it rested on the knob of his stick.

      They passed Elizabeth, who was also making ready to go. Hannah and Elizabeth mimed a kiss, Aaron looked at her once and nodded his big head.

      ‘Let

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