LITMIR.BIZ

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me, maybe? It wasn’t to Tom she wanted to say this, not any longer, but to his mother who had never loosened her grip on him.

      At length Marian turned her head.

      In the unguarded moment before their eyes connected Leonie saw what it was in Marian that was different this morning and the recognition of it arrested the momentum of bitterness in her.

      Marian was transfigured by grief. It washed the hauteur out of her face and left it loose and vulnerable.

      An uncalculated movement of sympathy started up in Leonie. She found herself kneeling down beside Marian’s chair and taking hold of her meaty hand. She squeezed it tight until the big diamonds of Dickson’s old-fashioned tributes bit into her clenched fingers. ‘Is Aaron dead?’

      ‘No. Not so far as I know.’

      Marian didn’t yield an inch. But Leonie could still imagine why such a chord of sorrow was sounding within her. The Beams and the Fennymores had lived side by side on the bluff for many years. They hadn’t been close friends, or at least Leonie had never detected any signs of particular friendship, but surely Marian would look back on the summers of her own life lived in parallel with Aaron’s and Hannah’s? The probability of Aaron’s death would make her think of Dickson’s and her own. The grief in her face must be for losses Leonie could only guess at.

      It was the place that affected them all. The beach reverberated with sadness. Why did I never recognise it before?

      Sadness was thick like the sea-salt in the air, and as blind and all-pervasive as the endless fogs. The peculiar taint of it clung to the Fennymores and Elizabeth, and it crept through her own tissues like a disease. Now she saw the ravages of it even in the invincible Marian. Under the bright, healthy skin of all their summers, the swimming and sailing and barbecue parties and tennis games, lay the invisible cancer of sadness. The spirit of the place.

      Leonie tried to dispel it, to rub some warmth back into Marian’s hand. ‘Can I do anything?’ she whispered.

      Marian inclined her head. The possibility of a connection stirred between them. Marian felt it too, it was obvious that she did. Leonie thought, Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we can talk to each other. I haven’t tried very hard. I will if she’ll let me. The beginnings of a smile twitched at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

      Marian’s head lifted again and she stared at Leonie. ‘Do anything? No, I don’t think so.’

      The possibility had been there, lying in the no man’s land between them, and she had seen it and chosen not to pick it up. Not only was it too late, the entire night had passed and now the day was coming round again.

      Slowly Leonie let go of her hand. She sat back on her heels with cramp twisting her leg muscles and shook her head as if to clear it after a ringing slap. ‘You never liked me, did you?’

      Sidonie had wandered on to the porch. She stood at the top of the steps looking out over the water in her pink dress and jelly shoes. One fist twisted up the hem of the frock, showing her pants underneath. The jet-black spirals on her forehead lifted a little. A breeze had sprung up off the sea and the tentative white mist would soon be gone.

      Marian had the grace to look startled. ‘You’re Tom’s wife. Of course I like you, Leonie. It goes much deeper than that, you’re family.’

      ‘I don’t think so.’ Leonie stood up, looking down on the fuzzy grey circle at the crown of Marian’s head, all the sympathy gone out of her. ‘I think you and I disliked each other from the beginning. The shame is that neither of us ever had the guts or the wit to own up to it. If we had done we might have fought about it, or even laughed at ourselves.’

      Richard wandered out with his coffee cup, and Karyn appeared, scooped up Sidonie and ran inside again. ‘What’s happening?’ Richard asked, without much interest.

      ‘Leonie’s upset.’

      ‘I’m not upset,’ she answered. The stored-up energy was suddenly released. It carried her along in a seductive rush. ‘In fact, I’m happy. I’m very happy because I’m going to walk out of here right now and I’m never coming back to this place again. I’ve had it with family parties and being an auntie, and a good daughter-in-law. I’m a failure at all of that and at being Tom’s wife as well, although God knows I’ve tried hard enough.’

      Marian’s face contained three perfect circles of shock and amazement, and when she looked at him Leonie saw that Richard’s expression mirrored his mother’s exactly. They were so alike, they were so fucking identical, all the Beams.

      Enough. In her outburst she had sounded just as petulant as Gail or one of the even younger ones. It was time to go, before the Beams or the beach itself finished her off. She half turned in the stunned silence and saw an arrangement of helmet crab and conch shells against the porch rail. She had always hated the beachiness of them, and now she picked up a shell in each hand and hurled them one after another in a curving trajectory towards the edge of the bluff. As if to smash the mirror of the sea. Of course, they fell far short even of the drop down to the beach. They bounced and rolled harmlessly in the seagrass.

      A tide of elation and cathartic fury carried Leonie the few steps to the porch door. She opened it and closed it behind her with elaborate care. In the kitchen there was another silence, with adults and children frozen in their places. They couldn’t have heard from here what had actually happened outside, but the atmospheric shock waves had rippled a warning all through the house.

      Leonie picked up Tom’s car keys from the counter top. Her own car was back in Boston. He always insisted it was pointless to have two cars up at the beach, even though when he went on one of his trips back to the city it left her without independent transport. Her handbag, luckily, was where she had left it yesterday on a chair on top of a pile of magazines. She dropped the keys inside and swung the strap of the bag over her shoulder.

      ‘Leonie …’ began Shelly, who was not a Beam and therefore might have been an ally, but still managed not to be.

      Leonie didn’t wait to hear her. She went out again into the high hallway and looked up the stairs towards their bedroom, Tom’s bedroom as it had always properly been, thinking about clothes and a suitcase. But then, through the narrow glass panes of the front door, she saw Tom himself coming between the dogwood bushes towards the house. The sight gave her a slight shock, as though she had already placed him somewhere else.

      He opened the door, one arm crooked around a bag of croissants and the newspaper.

      ‘Good run?’ she asked.

      She was blocking his way but he side-stepped around her, already moving towards the kitchen. ‘Yes, thanks.’

      ‘They’re all in there. Everyone’s in the kitchen except Marian and Richard, who are out on the porch.’

      He hadn’t even looked at her. But even if he had done, if he had faced her properly and taken account of her it would have been too late. The sweet stream of liberation was running too strongly.

      ‘Are you going out?’

      ‘Yes, Tom. I’m going out.’

      And with that she left the house. In the sunlight, which had now grown strong, she passed the rusting cage of the tennis court and the bushes that separated the garden from Elizabeth Newton’s. Each successive footstep was lighter and faster. Tom’s elderly Saab was parked nearest to the lane. She slid into the driver’s seat and adjusted the incline and the rear-view mirror to make it hers. As she reversed, then nosed forward into the road, she looked back at the house; the door was firmly closed and no one had come outside to follow her or try to stop her. Leonie realised she was panting for breath as if she had been running.

      She drove down the lane, away from Tom and Marian, and the Captain’s House, and the malign curve of the beach with the hungry glitter of sea-water beyond it. She slowed as she passed the Fennymores’, but there was no one to be seen there either.

      She took the south-westerly road out of Pittsharbor.

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