Moon Island (44 page)

Lucas was sitting forward on the sofa with his hands awkwardly dangling between his knees. He looked clumsy and, for once, uncomfortable with himself.

May went quickly and sat beside him. ‘I never thanked you for helping to look for me,’ she said. She had seen him, in the confusion of searchers who surrounded her after Spencer and Alexander had come up behind Marty. There had been no distinction to him then; none of the spotlit glow that had followed him all the summer. He had just been Lucas. Nor, May saw, was there any distinction now. He was good-looking, sun-tanned, ordinary. There was none of Marty’s silky threat in him … nothing to have enticed Doone beyond the point of reason. She didn’t know, now, how she could have imagined there was. But she did remember her own infatuation with him. It was a pale thing compared with Doone’s for Marty, but the memory of it made May certain in that instant that Marty hadn’t killed Doone. Doone had taken her own life, deliberately, in desperation.

‘It was so bad,’ Lucas confessed. ‘When you were lost. I would have done anything. Not just what I did do, which was only walking over the island a few times, you know?’

‘Thank you,’ May said awkwardly.

‘I didn’t want it to be like Doone. Not with you.’

‘I know. It wasn’t. I’m pretty glad about that myself.’

He didn’t give his high-voltage grin. Instead he glanced at Ivy and saw that her back was turned. ‘Uh, May, listen. I wanted to say I was sorry. Again, okay? About that time on Pittsharbor Night?’

‘It’s fine.’ May smiled at him. And at once she saw the infinitesimal change in his appraisal of her, as he reckoned with her smile, the way she tilted her head and the angle of her good arm on the cushions. Immediately she felt her own power as loud inside her as the beat of Ivy’s music, and Lucas reddened and stared down at his fidgeting hands.

Poor Doone, May thought. Wound up in the skeins of sadness that netted this place, never to break free of them. She was glad of her own escape, tomorrow. New York had never seemed so alluring. ‘Are you going to go on seeing Ivy?’

‘That’s kind of up to her.’ He shrugged. ‘Sure, I’d like to.’

You don’t stand a chance, May thought. Ivy spun round and the sisters grinned at each other.

‘We’re ready to eat,’ Ivy shouted. John came in from the deck, with rain shiny on the shoulders of his slicker, bringing cold air with him.

Lucas shuffled to his feet. ‘I better go.’

‘I’ll see you out,’ Ivy said. ‘Be at the Star Bar later?’

He waved at May, a mock-formal gesture that ended almost as a salute, and went on his way.

Once Lucas had gone, they sat down to eat. Ivy had laid three places close together at the top of the oversized oak table. They talked about the beach and Aaron, and about other holidays they had taken and might take in the future, and when she had eaten her tiny portion Ivy leant back and wound her sun-tanned arm through the slats of her chair back, continuing the conversation until May and John had finished too. Outside the rain slackened and turned to a soothing patter as the eye of the storm moved southwards.

Marty drove the unfamiliar car slowly down the coast road. It was a long thirty miles to the freeway in this direction. To his left were a dozen promontories, broken fingers of rock combing the spray from crashing waves, and on the other side dense swathes of conifers. The rain and the metronomic swish of the wipers, and the steady flicker of tree trunks in his headlamps, combined to make him overwhelmingly sleepy. He had slept hardly at all the night before, and very little the one before that. Thinking that music would help him to stay awake, he reached for the buttons of the radio, then remembered that it was a rental car and he would have to search the paperwork for the security code before he could make the thing work. He retracted his hand and stared ahead through the streaming rain.

The urge to let his eyes fall shut became irresistible. A yawn swelled in his throat and forced his jaws apart, and the tears it brought to his heavy eyes made him blink.

Some air, he must get some fresh air. He let down the window and a gust of salt-heavy wind drove rain into his face. He closed his eyes for a luxurious instant and clenched his hands on the wheel. The car strayed across the crown of the road.

The sea was very close. One of the inlets between the spines of rock must almost touch the road. He could hear the deep, insistent thunder of the waves driving into the confined space.

Marty opened his eyes and wrenched at the wheel to bring the car straight again. He pulled in to the side of the road, where dripping bushes swept the car wing, and switched off the engine. In the silence that followed a flash of lightning lit up the sky and sea. There was a ship under full sail, hardly a hundred yards off. He could see the pale canvas strain in the wind and the high bowsprit pitching against the seething water. His smarting eyes widened, stretching the orbits, and a snap of fear straightened his spine. He glanced into the driver’s mirror, but the road behind him was black and empty. When he looked again there was only the darkness, the sea invisibly booming into the rocky inlets, and the rain hammering on the roof of the car and needling his face through the open window. His retinas burned with the lightning flash and the image of the vessel etched with it.

Marty sat for a long time without moving, until his arms stiffened on the wheel and cold numbed his torso. Lightning flashed again, but there was no ship. No cars came by and in his solitude he felt as if he were the last man in the world.

At last he shook his head, as though he were trying to clear it of some persistent dream. He reached out with cold fingers and turned the ignition key. The engine fired and he eased the car slowly forward. Like an automaton, he drove on towards New York.

Sixteen

He descended the steps very slowly, placing one foot in front of the other with extreme deliberation. Every facet of the beach was grey in the early light: wet grey shingle, sullen water and long lines of breakers setting up a dull, continuous roar. Aaron reached the bottom of the steps and began to shuffle, leaning heavily on his stick. Gulls rose in an arc ahead of him, wheeling away from the storm debris at the high-water mark. He watched them as they soared against the clouded sky. His own progress was painful but still he lifted his head, a flicker of exhilaration within him fuelled by the scoured air. It was his beach, in all of its moods, but he loved it best when it was wild and inhospitable like this.

He had planned this morning’s expedition with great care, thinking of it as a break-out, and hoarding the energy and determination he knew he would need. Hannah couldn’t keep watch over him for ever and sure enough she had gone out to Pittsharbor for an hour to buy supplies. He was irritable that the slow traverse of the bluff and the steps was taking so long, but it was also illogical to be concerned about the time. He had made no arrangement, even though he might have picked up the telephone – that had never been his way – but he still nursed the hope that she would come, as she had done long ago.

The high-water mark was a tangle of wrack and line and shreds of garbage. He leaned on his stick to catch his breath, stirring the black fronds of weed with the toe of his boot. And when he looked up again she was walking to meet him. Her coat was wrapped about her and there was a scarf around her head. Sixty years had left her unmarked.

She reached his side. The surf was loud, but he heard her voice as clearly as if they had broken off their old conversation only an hour ago. ‘I was watching the beach,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I woke up this morning and I knew you’d be here.’

She had told him exactly the same at the very beginning, when she evaded her mother and came down to meet him between the fishing boats. There was a difference about the beach today, an iridescence in the light and a full-throated cadence to the sound of the sea, which reminded her of those days. She felt as light as a girl. They turned together and began to walk slowly along the crescent of the beach, just out of reach of the foam-lipped waves as they ran out into the shingle.

‘I am here,’ Aaron confirmed.

The Captain’s House and the Stiegels’ were closed and shuttered. He pointed up to them. ‘Gone back where they belong. You’ll be next, won’t you? You and Marian.’

She knew him so well. The distance of the years had telescoped, leaving only the mirage of time, which had ravaged their faces and seamed their skin. It was all a comedy, Elizabeth thought. She wanted to laugh, overtaken suddenly by the happiness of acceptance. There was nothing left for Aaron or for her to fight against. All their lives were embedded in the beach. They were no more than a comedy and an illusory ship, which seemed to carry the grains of tragedy away with it. Her eye was caught by the glimmer of a very small double shell lying among the pebbles. She stooped to retrieve it and examined the tiny gradations of rose-pink and pearl and silver. It was like a pair of baby’s fingernails. She held it in the palm of her hand, then tipped it gently back into the sea. All this she did while Aaron took a slow step and another.

‘Back to Boston, for the winter?’ She thought about it for a moment. Back to her bridge evenings and choral society, and good concerts, and the company of a few remaining friends she had known for most of her life. ‘Yes. Marian and me, one, then the other. The way it always has been.’
Acceptance
, Elizabeth thought.
The final achievement, to accept what was not susceptible to change.

‘They all think I’m going to die.’

‘It doesn’t look that way to me.’ She smiled at him, flirting, a girl again.

‘I’ll do it when I’m good and ready.’

‘Just as you always did.’

They walked on, another handful of steps. Elizabeth sensed that he was tiring now. She touched her hand to his arm, not quite connecting with his sleeve, just indicating that they should stop. They faced out, looking across to the island. The little beach was laced with driftwood. ‘I saw the Captain’s ship last night.’

He laughed, a sharp snort eloquent with a young man’s derision.

‘Little May Duhane saw it too, and Leonie Beam, although she didn’t know it for what it was,’ Elizabeth said.

Aaron’s dismissive laugh was a contradiction. His face had darkened with exhaustion. It was an effort for him to make a half-turn and begin the chain of steps that would take him back to his chair beside the stove. He was glad of Elizabeth beside him, her arm close to his, separated by a chink of air. They passed between the Beams’ sailing boat, swinging on its mooring line, and one of the rowboats pulled up high on the beach.

‘Do you remember?’ Elizabeth asked softly.

Once, one night before they learned to break into the Captain’s House, they had crept together beneath the shelter of an upturned dory. The smell of fish gut and tar and salt was the same as the scent of today.

‘I remember. Did you imagine otherwise?’

His sharpness pleased her. Of course he had not forgotten. They moved on, even more slowly, to the Fennymores’ house. Ahead were the public steps. Aaron stopped again and took a long look, from the Captain’s House up to the square façade of his own and on to the breadth of land that lay beyond it. Without warning tears beaded at the corners of his eyes and ran down his face. He muttered an inaudible syllable and bent his head, and when Elizabeth moved to comfort him he bit at her, ‘Just leave me be.’

‘What is it?’ Elizabeth asked.

‘Weakness.’

‘You aren’t weak. You were never that. Impatient and inexorable and angry, but never weak.’

He lifted his chin. His neck was thin and yellow, roped with sinews. ‘She’ll be back soon.’

He would mount the steps again and shuffle back to his chair, and Hannah would resume her vigil over him.

‘So I’ll say goodbye, Aaron. I’m going back to the city in a day or two, after I’ve closed up the house.’

He inclined his head, his involuntary tears already drying. They had not even touched hands. The winter lay ahead of them, a passage of ascending stairs of ice and vortices of wind, and they both knew it was an obstacle too great for Aaron to want to negotiate yet another time. ‘Until next summer,’ he said.

‘Next summer,’ she answered, keeping her voice level.

He did not want an avowal of any kind and nor did she. They had adopted a different way, for all of their adult lives. She brushed his cheek with her mouth, so briefly that it was only the ghost of a kiss. She was already moving away, her hand lifted, when he murmured, ‘Wait.’

She halted at once, watching his face and wondering.

‘Don’t let your boy put his houses up there,’ he ordered.
After I am gone
.

‘He doesn’t own the land, Aaron. He can’t build there.’

‘If Hannah sells.’

After I am gone, she might not think it worth holding on. She may weaken and give way.

Long ago Elizabeth had disappointed him, and in retaliation Aaron had fought hard for his place on the bluff. He had kept it out of pride. She understood what it meant, but she didn’t want to make a promise she couldn’t keep. The sea made its admonition at her back and the sea-birds turned in circles over the land. But the acquiescent lightness of the morning didn’t desert her. She knew the decision she should make. At last she said, ‘Spencer can’t buy anything without my money.’ Aaron’s eyes held hers. ‘He won’t have it, not until after my death.’

While she remained then, the bluff would be as they had known it together, in their separation.

He nodded and kissed her in his turn, the same dry, fleeting touch. Without another word he began the slow climb of the stairs and Elizabeth walked the beach. Neither of them looked back again. Nor did either of them notice they were being watched.

Marian was up on the widow’s walk at the top of her house. She had seen the two of them come from their opposite directions and their slow walk together to the water’s edge, and she had read the depth of their absorption in one another. Now she followed Aaron’s painful ascent and the hesitant steps across the rough ground to his porch. Elizabeth was lost in her own thoughts; she didn’t look up to see Marian’s bulk penned in by the fancy ironwork and silhouetted against the pearl-grey sky.