LITMIR.BIZ

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even to think of them together, reminded her of how it had been with Suzanne.

      Disliking Suzanne, steadily hating her, had made a guilty cloud that still hung around May. But feeling regret for driving her away didn’t make any difference to her mistrust and resentment of Leonie – who was married, who shouldn’t look at her father in just that way, which only May seemed to notice.

      Ivy shrugged it off, if she was aware of it at all. ‘Don’t use your imagination so much,’ she told her sharply when May tried to share her anxiety.

      And if she concentrated on this place, on the vacation itself, she only became miserably aware of her inability to fit in. The tennis and the barbecuing and beach volleyball jollity generated by the Beams made her shrivel up. She was too fat, too awkward and too used to being unhappy. But May didn’t recognise her unhappiness for what it was, merely having a sense that there was something the matter with her – for which she could only blame herself.

      There were the old people, she grudgingly acknowledged, Elizabeth and the Fennymores, who had tried to be kind to her. But May didn’t welcome kindness because of the accompanying suspicion that people felt sorry for her. If only she could be like Ivy, who was slick and thoughtless, and dismissed what she didn’t care for with a shrug and a single sarcastic lift of her plucked eyebrows.

      May sat down heavily on the grass bank, shuffling her back up against a convenient wooden post. She drew up her knees and rested her forehead on them, staring down at the blades of grass between her feet. The enormity of everything, all the countless profusion of grass stalks, and beads of moisture and minute insects, was suddenly terrifying. May rocked her head on her bent knees and screwed up her eyes to ease the burning behind them.

      More and more often she found herself thinking about Doone. The sense of collusion, the feeling that she was following Doone’s footprints clearly printed in the sand or the grass, grew steadily stronger in her mind.

      The first time she had read the diary she had gone straight through it, devouring every page, unable to disentangle herself from the fascination it exerted. Even though she now knew some of the passages almost by heart she still found it hard to extricate herself from Doone’s wild scribblings. The night before, she had gone through every entry yet again – those she could decipher, at least – sitting up late on the French bed and staring at the now-familiar handwriting. The scrambled numbers still danced in front of her eyes, maddening her with what she could not interpret. If Doone had left these messages for her, why was it that she couldn’t read them?

      There was also the woman on the island. The image of her returned to May as often as the thought of Doone, so that the two of them became connected and inseparable in her mind. The picture came back now, superimposing itself on the canvas of grass and moss. A pale woman in loose, colourless clothes. Standing still, watching and waiting.

      Sometimes May convinced herself that she had been just a picnicker, someone who had landed a boat on the seaward side and walked over the hump of wooded land to the bay beach. Perhaps she had been resting in the shade of the trees before making the scramble back to her friends or her husband, her children even, waiting by their sailing dinghy for her to come back from her explorations.

      At other times, when she lay awake in Doone’s bed following with her eyes the cracks in the ceiling, she knew that the woman was different, nothing to do with the bright and wholesome holiday place that was dominated by the Beams. The white oval of the woman’s face and her very stillness had been too alien. She was part of the water and the fog, and the low, brooding hump of the island itself. In some way she belonged with Doone, or Doone belonged to her.

      Aaron Fennymore had said that the Beach was resistant to rational explanation. The words stuck in May’s head, scratching her with an insistent point of fear.

      Someone was coming across the road. May looked up and saw Elizabeth.

      ‘Good morning, May. Are you busy or would you like some company?’

      She was wearing a straw hat, although the sun still hadn’t burnt away the last layers of mist, and a waisted dress printed with little flowers. May liked the way she looked and her old-fashioned politeness that managed to be quaint without being weird. ‘It’s okay. I don’t look busy, do I?’ She scrambled up and scrubbed at the wet seat of her shorts.

      ‘Perhaps we should take a walk together.’

      May gave a nod and a shrug, and fell into step beside Elizabeth. They turned along the road in the direction of Pittsharbor. May found it a relief not to be looking towards the crazy peaks of the Beams’ roof and the dark timbers of the Captain’s House, which seemed to suck in the light. Further on in this direction there were cottages in the woods, with towels drying on rails and couples putting cool-boxes in their cars, and ordinary families with little kids and babies in strollers. It was nice, with a friendly feeling. She felt suddenly that she shouldn’t walk on beside Elizabeth without saying something appropriately companionable. She racked her brains, then asked, ‘Do you like having your son up here to stay with you?’

      ‘Yes, I do.’ Elizabeth adjusted her hat and May saw the inside of her arm, the loose white skin seamed with thin spreading veins. ‘But he has to go back to Boston unexpectedly this afternoon. Some business he must see to at his picture gallery.’

      The way she glanced away and settled her face again, levelling her chin with determination, made it clear to May even in the depths of her own self-absorption that Elizabeth was lonely. ‘That’s a shame.’

      May wondered what she was doing on her own up here if it made her lonely and the speculation led her to reflect that the adults she knew mostly didn’t seem to suffer from loneliness. They had partners and friends, and complicated lives filled with choices, as her father and Ivy did. Being lonely had seemed an immature problem, most specifically her own. ‘Do you stay here all summer?’

      ‘I do, nowadays. I like to look after the garden, because my mother loved it so much. I told you that, didn’t I? When my husband was still alive we came only seldom, because he liked to go to Europe and to visit his sister in Virginia, and there was only so much time. He was a lawyer, you know. A busy man. Then, very soon after he retired, he was taken ill. He died six months after that.’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ May mumbled. She was thinking how horrible it must be to be old, a widow like Elizabeth or Marian Beam, or frail like the Fennymores. Once you had grown out of the horribleness of being a child, which must surely happen some day, how long did you have before it closed in again as old age? The seeming pointlessness of it all weighed down on her, so that her feet dragged beside Elizabeth’s brisk steps. Doone had written something like this in the diary, she remembered. It was one of the crazy despairing bits, when her exhilaration had evidently deserted her. She would read it again when she was back in her room.

      They walked on to a point where they could see the whole of the bay. The sun was stronger now and the island shimmered in nothing more than a faint haze. It would be a warm afternoon, perhaps even hot. Looking back over her shoulder from the top of the steps May could see a rowboat beached on the island sand. Perhaps Lucas and Ivy had gone out to their hollow together. Imagining them, May felt a contraction in her stomach and a shiver of nausea.

      ‘Let’s go on this way, shall we?’ Elizabeth pointed down the road and May could only nod, silenced by misery. As they walked, she listened to Elizabeth talking about what it had been like to spend summers here when she was a girl.

      Half a mile further on, set back under the shade of some crooked spruce trees, stood a little saltbox shack that had been turned into a restaurant named the Flying Fish. There was a blackboard at the roadside with the day’s dishes chalked on it, and a couple of tables crammed on the narrow front porch.

      ‘I used to play with the kids who lived here,’ Elizabeth said. ‘They’ve all moved away now. It’s been the Flying Fish for about ten years. Shall we stop for a drink?’

      ‘Okay. Please let me buy you one.’ For once, May had some dollar bills folded in her pocket. Enough, she calculated.

      ‘Why, thank you,’ Elizabeth said.

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