LITMIR.BIZ

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She nodded at the cut flowers in the vases and an embroidery frame standing close to the hearth.

      ‘Always makes me feel I ought to be on my best behaviour, your house, Elizabeth.’

      Elizabeth glanced at the other woman’s big bare feet. Marian had been wearing flipflops, but she had kicked them off. ‘Is that so, Marian?’

      She handed the coffee cups that had been her mother’s and her grandmother’s before that. They were gold-rimmed with a pattern of blue flowers, and the touch of them and their fragility always gave her satisfaction, even today.

      It was time to finalise their arrangements for Pittsharbor Day. The twenty-first of August was only a short time away.

      The date was said to be the birthday of Benjamin Pitt, who had arrived at the coast from southern Maine in 1770 with a group of settlers in search of grazing land. There were still Pitts living in the vicinity, but the commemoration of their ancestor had been a date in the local summer calendar for little more than twenty years. It was true that the festival was regarded as something to please the tourists rather than the townspeople themselves, but the summer visitors liked it and it raised some funds for the town, so every year there were fun runs and craft stalls, exhibitions of local artwork in the library and Main Street galleries, and a Fish Fry on the town landing. Bunting was zigzagged across the street and a softball tournament was held on the green alongside the church.

      Marian Beam was a great enthusiast for the day. It had become a tradition in the last few years for the houses on the bluff to run a wild blueberry bake stall. Marian had suggested the idea originally and the others had fallen in with her, because baking and selling was in the end easier than playing softball or taking a part in one of Amy Purrit’s Pittsharbor Musical Revues. Marian contributed her energy, her army of family helpers and tubs of wild blueberries bought from one of the farmers on the town road. Elizabeth lent her name and her mother’s recipes, and did some of the baking, but it was Hannah who did the bulk of the work. She was the best cook out of the three of them, although Jennifer Bennison had been a good assistant.

      Marian took out a pen and began writing in a notebook. ‘I don’t suppose we can count on the Duhane girls for too much.’

      Her pen stopped. The room went so quiet that the sea sounded like the steady pulse of blood in the chambers of their ears. Doone Bennison had drowned on 22 August last year. Elizabeth remembered the bunting flags hanging motionless from their strings as the police vehicle drove her body away from the town landing. Only an hour before, Jennifer Bennison had telephoned her to ask if she had happened to see her daughter sailing out of the bay. Jennifer said she must have taken her boat out early, while everyone was still asleep.

      ‘Don’t worry,’ Elizabeth had reassured her pointlessly. But still, she had been unable to settle to any of the tasks that were waiting for her. She had walked into town, telling herself she would collect the plates and dishes she had lent out for the bake stall. And she had been standing outside the town house as the news had run up Main Street like a freak wave.

      When she heard that the child had drowned she had to grope for the nearby fence to hold herself upright. Her head turned towards Moon Island, although she couldn’t see even the harbour water from where she was standing. What had Doone seen or done? She was an awkward child with an air of melancholy about her and Elizabeth had not known her well. But now she was possessed by certainty that there was a link between Doone and the old story; one which seemingly renewed itself, generation on generation. Elizabeth’s stomach had churned with a mess of shock and guilt, as though she might have saved Doone if she had tried, as if the drowning was her fault.

      Then Leonie Beam had come white-faced towards her. ‘They’ve gone to the house to tell Jennifer and Sam.’

      The two women had put their arms around one another, Elizabeth wordlessly grateful that Leonie was there.

      ‘We should speak to Marty Stiegel again.’ The silence was broken by Marian, of course. She scribbled another line and Elizabeth reached out to her coffee pot, lifted it with an effort and refilled Hannah’s cup. This annual enforced contact was always difficult. Marian was a vulgarian and Hannah a provincial mouse, but a silently critical one, always appearing to judge and find wanting. Yet, Elizabeth reminded herself in her mother’s voice, the job had to be done, whether she enjoyed it or not, because she had undertaken it.

      The previous year, Marty had brought along a gas barbecue and had made wild blueberry pancakes for all comers. It had been the success of the stall.

      ‘I’m sure he’ll help out again,’ Hannah judged.

      ‘They do have the baby this year.’

      ‘Marian, it’s only a couple of hours we’re asking for,’ Elizabeth said.

      They wouldn’t show their dislike too plainly, any of the three of them. It was muffled about with coffee and china cups and decorous arrangements for the bake stall. Elizabeth looked at Hannah’s pursed mouth and sharp eyes half veiled with pink lids, and thought of the years they had known each other, since they were both young women, all the years that had been pressed into shadowy negative images by no one admitting to their real feelings. Owning to nothing had kept Elizabeth away from Pittsharbor and the beloved bay, and the spellbound heart of the island itself, for the whole of her married life.

      Impatience with lists of ingredients and estimations of plates and forks needed, and calculations of charges and change crawled down her spine. It was an imposition to be old and look back on an unfulfilled life. Her memories bore a patina like clouded pewter, without colours or depth. Elizabeth wished she were young again and tasting the luxury of choice, with a passion that made her fingers tremble around the shell of her bone-china cup. And as she gazed downwards she was reproached by the sight of her own hands, age-blotched as they were and roped with sinews.

      ‘Do you agree, Elizabeth?’

      It was Marian demanding and she hadn’t heard the question.

      Marian was a bully. Elizabeth felt sorry for her children and their partners, and the grandchildren, driven into acquiescence by an overbearing old woman. Or was it better to be dominating in just the way that Marian was, rather than an accumulation of shadows, a prim negative, like herself? ‘I didn’t hear what you said.’ And she added with a certain satisfaction, ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t listening.’

      Marian’s tongue clicked. She repeated the question, which was to do with limiting the order of blueberry pancakes to one per customer because last year the line had wound all around the stall and caused a crowd, and in the thick of it some of the kids had pinched muffins off the dish at the front.

      ‘I don’t believe it matters a dab,’ Elizabeth sighed at the end of it.

      It was a phrase Aaron used. She couldn’t have given a proper reason for why she had come out with it now. Hannah’s expression was inscrutable. Her ankles were set together and her hands rested in her lap; she looked as if she was drawing herself in and away from the other two, and from the polished order of Elizabeth’s drawing-room.

      Marian pursed her lips and drew a line in her notebook.

      Under her direction they agreed next on who would make pies and who muffins, where the cold-boxes would come from and how many quarts of cream to order, as they did every year. At last the agenda was covered. Marian said, ‘I’ll have Karyn and Leonie help out, and I’ll ask Gail and those Duhane girls if they’ll do some of the marketing and washing up. They’ll like to be part of the day.’

      If Hannah and I had ever liked each other, Elizabeth reflected, we could join forces now and set Marian Beam exactly where she belongs. But the years had gone by and even the pain of long ago had been blunted and tempered by time. All that was left was the dilute sparring that took place over coffee and town celebrations, and the triviality of it made a mockery of what had been powerful enough to divide them in the first place.

      It was more than fifty years since Elizabeth had last seen the woman on the island. But the memory of her was still sharp in her mind.

      Marian was talking unstoppably as the three of them

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