Moon Island (12 page)

‘May?’

For the sake of saying something, deflecting this concern at all costs, she blurted out desperately, ‘I saw a woman on the island.’

Elizabeth leaned forward and took a slow sip of her iced tea. At this range May could see that tiny filaments of her lipstick had bled into the furrows around her lips. Then she lifted her head again and their eyes met. ‘What kind of a woman?’

‘I don’t know. Just … just a woman. Pale, with her hair all scraped back. Funny clothes, I guess. She was just standing looking at me.’

To her surprise Elizabeth nodded, as if she knew already.

A noisy family group came up the steps all together and banged in through the screen door to the interior of the restaurant. When they had gone, Elizabeth looked away towards the road and Pittsharbor. An RV passed with three bicycles bracketed on the back. ‘Have you ever been in love?’ Elizabeth asked softly.

May blew angrily through the straw in her Coke.
Being in love
was what Ivy went in for, and the thin girls in her class who whispered endlessly about boys and dating. ‘No.’

What she felt about Lucas was beyond love, at least the way Ivy and the others defined it. It was fascinating and appalling, and he had barely directed five words to her. She wished she could free herself from it, but it had wound her in its tentacles and she could not.

Elizabeth was still staring away down the road, the fingers of one hand gripping her glass of tea. ‘I fell in love for the first time when I was your age,’ she said, so quietly that May had to lean forward to hear. ‘Or perhaps I was a year or so older. Of course, we were less sophisticated then. We didn’t know all the things that you young women seem to take for granted now.’

‘I don’t think I know much,’ May said, and the tone of her voice made Elizabeth smile at her. ‘Tell me about it,’ May asked.

‘I will, if you think it would be interesting.’

May didn’t think it would, particularly, but she was glad to settle for anything that spared her from having to talk and therefore risk the ignominy of tears.

Elizabeth repeated, ‘I was so young. Perhaps nothing that happens to us afterwards in life ever quite matches the intensity of that first falling in love. Nothing, not marriage nor having children nor acquiring age and experience.’

Her gaze had turned inwards, May saw. She was looking at something that was no longer there.

It had been a day not very different from this one, misty at first, then shimmering with the afterthought of heat. Elizabeth clearly remembered the dress she was wearing. It was crisp linen, banana yellow, with a full skirt and cuffed short sleeves, which flattered the smooth, summer-golden skin of her forearms. Bought with her mother on a shopping trip to New York and put on for the first time for her grandparents’ party.

It was a luncheon for Maine friends and families, most of whom Elizabeth had known from childhood. There had been white sailcloth canopies slung from ribboned poles to shade the garden, and English silver porringers filled with white and yellow roses to decorate the tables. The house had been scented with lavender and filled with music from the piano in the evening room, and the women’s heels had clicked out an intermezzo on the old wooden floors.

Elizabeth had drunk her first glass of champagne as a birthday toast to her grandmother, the Senator’s wife, and after the speeches, as she had dreamed all day of doing, she wandered away from the heart of the party to the kitchen where the cook and two maids were working. From there it was only a short step through the side door to the back of the house facing away from the hammered-metal sea. A line of cars was parked there, two or three of them attended by lounging chauffeurs. Elizabeth slipped past them into the lane and began to walk slowly in her ankle-strap high-heeled shoes, feeling the eye of the afternoon sun fixed on her head. She had turned in the opposite direction from Pittsharbor and now she passed the Captain’s House. A low whistle stopped her in her tracks.

He was waiting for her in what had become their place. The house was empty and dilapidated, because the old woman who was the captain’s daughter had died in the spring. Pittsharbor talk had it that the place had been bought for a summer cottage by rich people from off, but there was no sign of them as yet. In the meantime, Elizabeth and the boy had found a screen and an inner door that they could prise open, so the whole house was their domain.

He held the door ajar now, and she ran across the turf and up the sagging steps so that he caught her and snapped the door shut behind them. For a long second they stood looking at one another, the gloom of the house shifting and re-forming into welcoming shadows as their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness.

He kissed her then, tasting the champagne foreign in her mouth.

For weeks, ever since the beginning of the summer when Elizabeth had come up from Boston with her mother, they had been waiting and watching for opportunities to meet in the old house. Their meetings happened seldom enough, because Elizabeth had to explain every absence and the boy had his work to do, but today was perfect. Everyone at the house was busy with the party and the tide had brought the fishing boats back early.

‘You look so pretty,’ he told her, and ran the tips of his fingers over her shoulders and down to her breasts. The yellow dress had a row of tiny covered buttons, and he bit his lower lip between his teeth and stopped breathing as he undid them one by one. Elizabeth thought of the protests she should make, but even as the thought came she gasped and abandoned it, letting her head fall back against the peeling wall.

They had done this before; when the two of them had grown bruised and sticky with kissing he had touched and stroked her breasts with his salt-cracked fingers. He had been almost too gentle, and without properly understanding her hunger Elizabeth had snatched his hands in her own and greedily bitten and sucked at them. She had licked the cuts made by running lines and gutting knives, and the punctures from fish-hooks until he had muttered roughly, ‘Don’t, don’t you do that.’

Today was different. They hadn’t talked about why, but they both silently accepted that the difference was momentous.

In the corner of the room he had spread a rug on the bare boards and a pillow with a split in the seam that exposed the feather innards. He took her hand now and led her towards it. The seaward windows were sealed with storm shutters but cracks had opened in the old wood and they let in long streaks of light to lie like fuzzy blades on the floor. When they knelt and faced each other a few puffs of goose-down escaped from the pillow and floated like minuscule clouds. Elizabeth’s arms rested on his shoulders, and with careful movements he lifted the rustling folds of linen and slid his hands up her thighs.

She shifted a little, hesitant, then yielding. Their mouths met again, familiar after weeks of touching but wider now and wetter, until each of them felt they might slip down the other’s throat and be swallowed up for ever.

A minute later, it seemed, the yellow dress had been dropped to one side and Elizabeth lay back naked with one hand crooked to pillow her head. She had imagined this moment, and feeling ashamed and exposed, but now she was wiser she understood that neither shame nor exposure was at issue. Nor were questions of right and wrong. This was right and it was what she wanted.

He knelt between her spread knees, as naked as she was, his hair as black as ship’s tar and his beaky tanned face taut with longing and concentration. He was holding himself with one hand as if he was afraid he might spill too soon. ‘Is it what you want?’

She hadn’t felt herself to be the leader in any of their doings before this minute. He was two years older and belonged here with the rocks and currents of the shoreline, and he knew and was able to do much more than she ever would because she was a pampered city girl. But still by some alchemy she had become the navigator and the helmsman now. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is.’

Looking at his face and the muscled lines of his body she thought she would melt with love. She lifted her hips, her eyes slanting with a smile, offering herself to him. With a helpless groan he pushed himself into her.

It hurt. The pain of it took her completely by surprise. She turned her head aside, biting her tongue and the inside of her mouth, staring over his heaving shoulder at the walls marked with the ghostly outlines of pictures and furniture. For an instant the room seemed full of ghosts who crowded in to watch her crossing into womanhood. Suddenly fear unfolded terrible wings in her stomach. She gasped, ‘Be careful. Please be careful.’

He was already shuddering. He shouted something she couldn’t decipher and pulled away from her, and she lay motionless with her eyes wide open as he ejaculated. Afterwards she held his head in her arms, strands of his sweat-soaked hair caught in her mouth. The pain had gone as quickly as it had come and her fear had subsided with it. Nothing that happened now, whatever there was in the future, could take this moment from them.

Their first time had been together.

A tiny beat of triumph and relief and happiness began to tick in her throat. She peeled his hair away from her mouth and waited for him to come back to her.

When he opened his eyes he looked dazed, overcome in a way that she had never even glimpsed in him before. He locked her in his arms, pinning her against him. ‘I love you. I want you to marry me.’ The declaration was almost violent.

Elizabeth said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re sixteen now. When you’re eighteen we can do it. We can make them say yes.’ He meant her parents and grandparents, and their old-money objections to a mere Pittsharbor fisherman. His family might be equally old, but they were also poor. It was a big obstacle, a huge barrier set across the future.

‘I love you too,’ she said humbly. It was the truth. ‘Will you wait until I’m ready to tell them about us?’

He smiled then, believing that he would get what he wanted in the end. Elizabeth Freshett would marry him and they would live in a house overlooking the bay and Moon Island.

‘I’ll wait. I’ll go on loving you until I’m an old man and I’ll still love you after I’m dead.’

They lay in each other’s arms in a drift of goose-down, awed by the magnitude of their commitment.

Later, when she walked back alone to her grandfather’s house with the linen dress creased and dusty, Elizabeth was facing the end of the summer and separation from the boy she had just promised to marry in the sun-barred stillness of the Captain’s House. The party was ending and her mother had been looking for her. Amazed that the truth wasn’t clearly written in her face, Elizabeth told her that the sun and heat had given her a headache, and she had been walking on the beach to try to rid herself of it.

‘Look at your dress,’ her mother exclaimed. Appearances were always crucial to her.

‘I’ll go and change,’ Elizabeth answered, the meek daughter with rebellion and love twirling in her heart.

Some of this, only the bones of it without the precious details that were still as clear in her mind as yesterday, Elizabeth told May on the porch of the Flying Fish.

May heard her out politely. She finished her Coke and jabbed the straw into the mush of melting ice at the bottom. ‘You used to sneak off and meet this guy in our house?’

‘The house where you are staying now, yes.’

May didn’t want these confidences. In any case it was inconceivable that this old lady had once been young, let alone had sex – that must be what she was saying in her genteel way – had
screwed
some nameless fisherman in an empty house they had broken into together. The idea of adult sex,
old
sex, all the teeming sequences and varieties of it, even and especially Ivy and Lucas, was revolting and threatening. It made May more conscious of the lump of misery lodged inside her but she could only admit obliquely, with her thoughts sidling up to the idea and skittering desperately away again, that the misery was something to do with John and Suzanne, and the threat of John with Leonie Beam. She hunched her shoulders rigidly and glared down into her empty glass.

‘Would you like another Coke, May? It’s my turn.’

‘Uh, no, thanks.’

She wasn’t sure how to extricate herself from this uncomfortable conversation. In an attempt to sanitise the story’s ending she mumbled, ‘So he was your husband, right?’

‘No. I married someone else.’

The bleakness, the note of pure despair in the old woman’s voice made even May look up and beyond her own concerns. ‘Yeah? Why was that?’

Elizabeth paused. ‘I don’t know that it will be in any way intelligible to you. I was a Freshett, my mother was an Archbold from Portland.’

May waited for further explanation.

‘A year went by and I was as much in love as ever. At last, when I was eighteen, I told my mother who the boy was and why I wanted to marry him.’

‘And?’

‘They refused their permission. They were quite adamant, so the choice I had to make was between my family and the life I knew, and a boy whose life and background were entirely different from mine.’

‘Well, that doesn’t sound so hard, in a way. Doesn’t everyone kind of have to make choices when they pick people?’ May was interested now in spite of herself and impatient with the irrelevance of all these family names.

‘Yes, they do. I didn’t understand that really I was free to choose, or at least could try to be brave and set myself free. That’s what I meant when I said you know all kinds of things that I didn’t at your age.’

Was that the case, May wondered? She didn’t feel she had the luxury of any choices in the plodding discomfort of her daily existence. ‘So what happened?’ The end of the saga must surely be in sight.

‘I was sent off to Europe. I spent eighteen wonderful months travelling, and living in London and Paris. When I came back I met and married my husband, to please my family. He was a good man, quite a lot older than me, and we lived comfortably together.’

Elizabeth’s glass clinked in its saucer as she gently laid her spoon beside it. Her mouth made a thin river-line with its tiny tributaries of lipstick bleeding away from it. It hadn’t been a happy ending. May guessed clumsily at the implications of regret and missed opportunities threading back through years and years of an old woman’s uneventful life, then she bundled up the thought and pushed it away from her.