LITMIR.BIZ

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like a blessing. John held open the door for her and she passed into the shadowy room. The dimness and the wintry smell of woodsmoke was momentarily confusing, and she looked around to regain her bearings. A Walkman and a scatter of tapes lay on the table, amid a litter of dirty plates and glasses. Sneakers and a baseball cap and a Coke bottle decorated the steep stairs.

      John opened the old-fashioned refrigerator and took out ice and mineral water. He filled a glass and gave it to her, and Leonie drank and rolled the beaded coldness between her sweaty hands. It was the first time they had been alone together since their walk to Berry Island. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

      ‘Why do you keep saying that?’

      ‘I suppose I’m just used to it.’

      ‘That sounds like the answer of a weaker person than I think you are.’

      He took her by the arms and while he was holding her looked carefully into her face. Instead of saying anything she waited, letting him discern whatever there was to see. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

      She knew what she wanted now, this minute, and the recognition made her skin burn. Beyond that she had no idea how to sort the longings into a sequence she could give voice to.

      He slid his hands to her shoulders and drew her against him. There was still time, Leonie thought wildly. Everything that had happened between them up to now – talk, lunch, kiss, walk – could be lightly dismissed or explained away. She could give a little regretful laugh or a rueful shrug, and step away from John Duhane and back into the dissemblance of her life. I don’t want to. I don’t want to step back. It was impossible for everything to go on being exactly the same. Whatever she did, it would have to mean change beginning at this moment.

      Even as she hesitated Leonie was reflecting on damage, and how the instrument of her infidelity would almost certainly smash the last struts of her marriage and the remnants of Tom’s affection for her – if there were any. There was John’s life to consider also, and his daughters’, and the complications that would be visited on all of them. But if there was no stepping back, all she could hope to do was walk forward. The thought was like a reprieve and it made a beat of happiness shiver through her. John saw the change in her eyes and bent his head as she lifted hers.

      When they kissed the tape of guilt and self-admonition stopped running. It was natural to do what they were doing and the urgency of it amazed them both. Leonie gave herself up to him and he took the offering with pleasure. It was a long time before they moved apart again and even then he kept hold of her, as if he was afraid that otherwise he might lose her.

      He was looking for words and at last he said, ‘I’ve wanted to do that almost ever since I met you. But I don’t want to cause pain, or do damage. I’ve experienced enough of that.’

      His echoing of her feelings was so precise that she laughed in sudden surprise and touched his cheek with her fingers. What scarred veterans we both are, she thought. ‘I knew you did, and I know what you don’t want because I don’t want exactly the same things. But neither do I want to turn my back –’ she paused, reversing her palms upwards to reveal their emptiness ‘– on whatever chance we might have. Am I allowed to acknowledge that? Or is it misplaced?’

      ‘No,’ he said gently. ‘Not misplaced as far as I am concerned. But I am free to say that because I’m not married or in any way attached. Except to my children, that is.’

      Leonie nodded. ‘There are some things I should tell you. I’d like to tell you, before anything else happens between us. If anything else is going to happen, of course.’

      ‘Would a proper drink be a help?’

      ‘Yes, it would.’

      He found a bottle and poured whiskey for both of them. Leonie sat down on one of the battered chesterfields and let her head fall back luxuriously against the cushions. The bright sunlight squared behind the old windows made the whiskey taste dramatic and nocturnal. She blinked back the tears the first gulp brought to her eyes. ‘The failure between Tom and me began a long time ago. Began and took its course. It’s complete now. It was nothing to do with you, then or now, except that on the day we had lunch at Sandy’s Bar I looked down at my plate and it dawned on me that Tom and I didn’t love each other any more. And once I knew it I couldn’t get rid of the knowledge.’

      ‘I understand that.’

      ‘I did that clumsy thing of kissing you in the car-park. It was in a kind of reckless glee, because of what I had just realised and because I knew that at least there would be a difference now, instead of the same old painful monotony.’

      ‘And there was I thinking you kissed me because you wanted to kiss me.’

      Leonie took another happy swallow of the whiskey. The rawness of it in her throat was fiercely pleasurable. She thought she could easily get drunk, letting all her locked-up feelings run sloppily loose, then climb into bed with John Duhane and never get up again. ‘Oh, I did want to. And I wanted to give Spencer Newton something to think about, of course.’

      ‘Of course.’

      He wasn’t touching her now. He was simply sitting beside her and listening, and the wholeness of his attention made her understand how isolated she had been. She basked in the comfort of his notice, resting her cheek against the glass she had just emptied. ‘I think I’m an intimacy junkie.’

      The idea was tangential enough to make her wonder if she was already drunk, but John didn’t miss a beat. ‘Yes, maybe we both are. And we’re afraid of our addiction, so we shy away from what we long for.’

      He was at least as lonely as she was, Leonie understood. She remembered what John had told her about Suzanne and the other stillborn relationships that had followed Alison’s death. It wasn’t just May and Ivy, then, who had pinched the bud before it flowered, but something in John himself. And what did that mean about him and Alison? ‘Tell me about her,’ she asked and waited, suddenly aware of the shadows in the room that remained out of reach of the sunlight, and the insistent murmur of the sea.

      ‘Al was very … vivid. I told you. She could swing between euphoria and despair within a day, sometimes it seemed like within an hour. And she never saw anything wrong with that, she thought it was how life should be lived. She never made compromises about what she wanted or what she believed in. I always loved her, from the time we first met.’

      ‘And she loved you.’

      He took it as a question. ‘Yes, in her way.’

      ‘Were you faithful to each other.’

      ‘I was.’

      On the beach May pushed herself into the volleyball game. The bright sunlight made her frown but Kevin Beam sidestepped to allow her some space and she flashed him what she thought might be an Ivy smile. If she could penetrate this circle, she thought, and join up with the younger Beam brothers and their dumb games and be near Lucas, then she could get free of Doone. If she hung out with the other kids and smoked weed and giggled like Gail and Ivy and the others, then everything would be ordinary again. There would be no island woman and no grave overgrown with wild herbs and nothing to be afraid of.

      The ball boomed over her head to the opposite side of the net and Lucas swung his crossed wrists to connect sweetly with it. The ball soared again as a star-shaped image of brown limbs and torso and a face blurred with hair printed itself behind May’s eyes. She planted her feet apart and bent from the hips, waiting for the ball as she had seen Ivy do, but she was too late and her eyes were still dazzled as it came out of nowhere and hit her on the shoulder.

      ‘Hey, Maysy, that’s some cool play. We want you on our team for Pittsharbor Day.’

      She knew that Kevin and Joel were smirking behind her back. She twirled round to face them and forced another smile. ‘Sure. You can count on me.’

      ‘Thanks, man.’

      ‘May!’ Lucas was calling her. He punched the ball in her direction and as if she were pulled towards

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