LITMIR.BIZ

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sand toys and beach bags and rubber rings, and a rug spread for the babies.

      Tom was doing his run. He was at the far end of the beach now, his feet sending up little sparkly silver plumes of spray as he plunged along at the water’s edge. Next he would thud up the stone steps and disappear down the coast road to the village. In Pittsharbor he would buy bagels and newspapers, and come home with snippets of gossip about whom he had seen and what messages they wanted relayed to Marian.

      Leonie stood expressionlessly watching him until he reached the end of the beach. Then she went on down the steps and laid her book on one of the canvas chairs.

      ‘Leonie!’ Marian called to her from knee-deep water. ‘Angel, there you are. What have you been doing? Ashton needs his little sun-hat. Will you find it in the bag there … no, no, the red bag, darling. And bring it to me.’

      Leonie obediently paddled out with the hat. Marian swung round and the baby on her hip waved his fists and laughed with delighted pleasure.

      ‘There’s the boy. Hat on for Grammer, there we are.’ She smoothed the white cotton with a sun-tanned, capable, heavily ringed hand.

      Marian Beam was a widow. In her middle sixties she remained handsome, her broad face creased with the lines of a lifetime’s emphatic emotion and marked with the irregular sepia freckles of sun damage. Marian liked to be noticed. She emphasised her large, dark eyes with smudgy charcoal pencil and kept her silvery streaked hair long and flowing. For convenience she pinned it off her face with a series of combs.

      Marian loved children. She had had five of her own. Kids were her thing, she often said. And as for grandchildren, well, they were the greatest gift God could bestow. It was her sadness that poor Dickson couldn’t be here to share the joy of seeing them grow up. Dickson was Marian’s late husband. He had died fifteen years before, most probably, Leonie thought, of sheer exhaustion from living alongside Marian for nearly thirty years.

      ‘You could have married again,’ Leonie remembered saying to Marian years ago, not long after she had married Tom. ‘You were only fifty when Dickson died.’

      Marian had smiled luminously. ‘My dear, Dickson was my husband. I couldn’t have thought of anyone else. And I had my boys, and Karyn. I felt rich enough.’

      That was how she always talked about them. There were the four boys, of whom Tom was the second, all strapping replicas of their father, and then there was the late, longed-for girl. Karyn was thirty now. She had given her mother plenty of problems but lately she seemed to have settled down. Ashton was her second baby by her live-in partner Elliot. Elliot was black, and the two children were exquisite, plump cafe au lait armfuls.

      With the addition of Sidonie and Ashton, Marian now had eleven grandchildren. None of them was from Tom and Leonie.

      The two women stood side by side in the water, looking back at the bluff and the houses. The old clapboards and pointed gables were softened by the benign light. Even the tarry dark-stained shingles of the Captain’s House shimmered as if washed with a milky glaze.

      The Beams’ was the largest of the five summer cottages overlooking the beach. It stood majestically in the centre, the complicated pitches of its steep roof pierced by dormer windows and surmounted by a widow’s walk. From the flagpole in centre front a faded and frayed American flag twitched in the fitful breeze. Marian always hoisted the flag as soon as she arrived at the beach. Dickson’s flag, she called it.

      The house was entirely surrounded at ground level by a wide porch, the home of sagging hammocks and swing seats and surfboards awaiting rehabilitation and windsurfer sails and ancient bicycles, tangled up with driftwood trophies and shells and all the other relics of past holidays. It was just this endless continuity about the place, the silted layers of historical minutiae, which oppressed Leonie.

      ‘We’ve always done this,’ Tom explained to her at the beginning. ‘Moon Island Beach is embedded inside us all. I can’t imagine spending a summer anywhere else.’

      ‘Not Europe?’ Leonie had protested. ‘Venice? Tuscany? The French Riviera?’

      He had dutifully taken her to Italy for their honeymoon. But the next year, and every year after that, they had returned to the beach. And at the beach house Marian was the matriarch. She presided over daughters-in-law and children and grandchildren like some fertility goddess.

      Leonie stirred one leg in the water. She could feel warmer and cooler layers swirling around her calves, cooler on the surface. The storm had stirred everything up. ‘Where is everyone this morning?’ she asked. There was only Sidonie asleep on a towel in the shade of one of the parasols.

      ‘The kids are playing tennis.’

      There were four of them, Lucas and Gail and Joel and Kevin, the children of Marian’s eldest son, Michael. All four of them came out every summer to stay at the beach, just as their parents had done all through their own childhoods. This year, unusually, their mother and father had gone to Europe. ‘And Karyn and Elliot are out in the boat.’

      Leonie looked and saw the white mainsail and jib of the Beams’ Flying 15 running out beside the island. She nodded, wondering with a part of her mind exactly how she would occupy herself for this morning, and the afternoon that would follow it, and the nights and days after that. The beach and Marian and the family affected her like this.

      A man Leonie didn’t recognise was standing up in front of the Captain’s House and a young woman in a double sliver of bikini was spikily descending the steps. ‘Who are they?’ she asked Marian.

      ‘They’re the Bennisons’ tenants, I guess. I hope they’re going to be an addition.’

      Marian meant an addition to the local texture and colour, to the ever evolving art-form of the family summer holiday.

      At the same moment there was a loud whoop from the garden of the Beams’ house, signalling that the tennis was over.

      Marian said, ‘Take the babe for me, Leonie,’ and handed over the peachy weight of him without waiting for Leonie’s agreement. She waded out of the water, ready to welcome the older grandchildren, her tucked up skirt revealing navy-blue thickened veins behind her heavy knees.

      They came streaming down the beach, headed by a suntanned young man of twenty in tennis shorts and a faded vest. He wore his long hair pulled back in a stringy pony-tail.

      ‘Lucas,’ Marian called to him, but her eldest grandchild’s attention was elsewhere. He had seen the bikini girl, who was wandering across the shingle and occasionally turning over shells with one languidly pointed toe.

      May walked from the window of her bedroom to the door and pressed her knuckles against it, making sure that it was firmly closed. She was repeating a manoeuvre she had made only five minutes earlier but she could not have explained the need to make sure she was alone. She knew the house was empty; she had seen Ivy disappear down the beach steps and John was sitting reading a book on the bench above the sea wall.

      With the door closed she felt safe. A fly buzzed against the window-pane. The forlorn room held her enmeshed in its drowsy heat. There were thirteen steps from the door to the window; she had already counted them. Her belongings were unpacked, sparsely laid out on the shelves. There was nothing else to do up here and the sea and the island were bathed with clean blue light. The water of the bay was dotted with cheerful coloured sails. She should put on a swimming costume and go out, like Ivy, into the sunshine.

      May had bought a new one-piece from Macy’s. It was red-and-white plaid and she had thought she looked okay in it. A bikini was out of the question and now when she put it on she saw that even this suit showed the cellulite at the top of her legs. She stood for a long moment looking at her torso in the mirror over the dresser, then blindly turned away. If she didn’t go out now she was afraid she never would. She might climb back under the bedcovers and stay there with her knees pulled up to hide her stomach.

      The fly had fallen to the window-sill. The buzzing was louder and desperate. May retraced her steps to the door. But when she grasped the handle and pulled

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