LITMIR.BIZ

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apparently by whim instead of iron rules of quality and value. Leonie found this refreshing.

      When they had finished they hesitated beside the road, watching the tailback of traffic.

      ‘Thanks for the ride,’ Leonie said. ‘Looks like I’ve brought you into town at just the wrong moment.’

      After May’s exit Leonie had told John she must do some shopping. It was true: Tom had gone back to Boston to undertake the battle with his chef, otherwise the job would not have been delegated to her, but Marian had handed her a list that morning. Everyone else was busy with children or watersports.

      John had said at once, ‘I’ll drive you. I’ve got some stuff to get, too.’

      Now he turned his back on the glittering lines of cars and looked down at her. ‘I think we should have lunch.’

      Leonie thought for a moment. She had the impression that there were unspoken negotiations taking place within this bland exchange. The realisation made heat prickle beneath her hairline and the picturesque and fully restored old façades of Main Street took on a more highly coloured focus. ‘What about all this shopping?’ she asked. Of course, Tom would never have left fresh fish broiling in the afternoon sun in the back of a car.

      By way of answer John went back to the fish stall and returned with a bag full of ice. They bedded their purchases beneath it in the trunk of the station-wagon. Then he led the way to Sandy’s Bar, the best place to eat in Pittsharbor but no longer patronised by the Beams because Tom had had a disagreement with the proprietor the summer before. It gave Leonie an agreeable feeling of disloyalty to settle herself with John in a corner booth draped with fishing nets and studded with shells.

      It was cool in Sandy’s; she pushed her damp hair off her face and eased the armholes of her cotton vest where they cut into her armpits. She was conscious of John watching these small movements; it felt like a long time since a man had watched her in just this way, but she accepted his gaze, letting it lie on her skin like warm honey.

      With Tom there would have been critical deliberations over the menu, but now she chose food and drink at random. They were talking about their lives, filling in details that needed establishing before they moved on. She learned that John ran his own business mail delivery service. It was a successful company, but he found the demands of it difficult to balance against the need to take care of Ivy and May. In her turn Leonie described her work as an editor for an art and art-history publisher in Boston. She told him about the economics of high-quality colour printing and her plans to commission a series of monographs on women artists of the twentieth century. A plate of griddled shrimp with a hot Thai sauce was put in front of her and she blinked in surprise, having forgotten what she had ordered.

      The talk threaded between them like a line of stitches. After the first connecting seam was made they felt free to change direction. Leonie said suddenly, ‘I’m not comfortable in that beach house, but just the same, Tom always wants us to spend the summer vacation up here. Marian makes me feel that I deliberately don’t conform. That I must be denying her more grandchildren on a whim.’

      ‘Hasn’t she got enough already? What about the population crisis?’ Their eyes met, testing the strength of the seam. ‘Doesn’t she know you can’t conceive?’

      ‘Of course she does. But perhaps if I just tried harder. Babies were so easy for her, and for Anne and Shelly and Gina. They’re the other daughters-in-law. Even Karyn, who didn’t manage to get much else right before that, cruised it.’

      Looking down at her food Leonie thought of the hospitals; the tubes and the needles and the drugs and the waiting, and the increasingly desperate connections with Tom that had led them there. Tom had become angry with her, that was what had happened. She didn’t blame him for his anger, just for the form it had taken. He had retreated from her, and left her marooned on her island of sterility.

      ‘Is it difficult to talk about it?’

      ‘Only in the sense that there isn’t anything to say any longer.’

      The waiter removed their plates. Outside, the sky turned the solid, passive blue of mid-afternoon. Back at the house, Karyn or Marian would have put the babies to bed for their afternoon rest and the adults and older children would move softly, allowing them their sleep.

      ‘Will Ivy and May wonder where you are?’

      ‘Ivy won’t. I don’t know about May. You saw her, this morning.’

      Skewering them with her eyes. Jealous and dismissive at the same time. ‘Yes.’ The talk veered again. They were zigzagging close to intimacy.

      ‘They were both so hostile to Suzanne. I was amazed by the intensity of it. She was the first potentially serious involvement I’d had after Alison died, and it was almost three years later. At the beginning, when I first introduced her, they were welcoming enough, even friendly. And Suzanne did everything she could.’

      I’m sure she did, Leonie thought.

      ‘She used to come round for dinner at first, and the girls and I would get together and plan a meal we could cook for her. Then she went shopping with them once or twice. May wanted a special outfit or something and Suzanne was a store buyer. Then the four of us went on a couple of weekend trips, which worked out fine. I thought we were going to make something of it, in the end maybe turn into a family.’

      Leonie could see how John would want a mother for his girls, as well as a woman for himself. That was natural. But she guessed there were cross-currents of jealousy and mistrust in children, which ran invisible and powerful against the tide of what seemed natural. ‘What happened?’

      ‘Suzanne began to stay over at the apartment. Not all the time, not even often. But as soon as she did they turned against her.’ He rotated the stem of his glass in his fingers, watching the splintered lozenges of light it threw on the table-cloth. ‘Not difficult to understand why. But it finished everything off in the end.’

      Leonie could imagine it. Suzanne’s retreat, John’s resentment, the girls’ pleasureless triumph in their achievement. She began to understand what a landscape the unspoken negotiations between John Duhane and herself might have to cover. A sudden jagged breath caught in her windpipe and even as she pressed her thighs together against the loosening between them, she was forbidding herself anything more. She was married and none of these silent phrases had been in her vocabulary for a long time.

      Then something happened. She was gazing at some paired cherries on John’s plate. And as clearly as she saw their waxy sheen and wishbone stalks in front of her she knew that she no longer loved Tom any more than he loved her in return.

      The cherries looked so ordinary, and the detritus of the meal spread over the cloth, and yet her bearings had shifted so suddenly and radically that she half-expected them to mutate into different objects. A knife-blade reflected a little asterisk of light at her as she stared at it. For more than ten years she had made her judgements and interpreted her place as Tom’s partner. Now she understood that each of those daily measurements was wrongly calibrated and therefore worthless, because they had no love left for each other. All the pressure of needing a child, and the bitterness and anger and violence that blossomed between them, were rooted in this one truth. A child would just have been a diversion. A bandage for a mortal wound.

      For a moment she felt cold and calm, like the oily sea under a flat Maine mist. Then a wave of panic shrugged itself up and washed over her. The plump cherries blurred in front of her eyes, turning to dull blotches of crimson.

      ‘Are you all right?’ There was a crease between John’s eyebrows and one corner of his mouth was bitten in.

      ‘Yes. But I’m … thinking. We should take that shopping home.’

      The crease stayed, but he was already signalling to the waiter for the check.

      Outside he took her arm and steered her between the cars. The line of traffic at the lights was shorter now, and an afternoon daze of heat and lassitude had settled on Pittsharbor. They crossed the car-park to John’s station-wagon and he leant

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