Moon Island (3 page)

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 it wouldn’t open. It only shifted slightly, resisting her efforts. It was as if someone else were leaning a shoulder against it. To keep her there, within the stuffy confines of the room.

With her breath catching in her throat May pulled harder. The door suddenly sprang open and she gave a muffled croak of surprise. Without looking back she fled down the stairs and through the screen doors on to the deck. There was an old woman in the garden of the next-door house. She had been bending over a clump of tall blue flowers, but she saw May and stood up, straight-backed, watching her with uncomfortable intentness. Even at this distance May didn’t like it. She ducked her head and ran down the sandy path, rough grass whipping at her ankles.

John looked up from his book. ‘Sun cream,’ he called after her as she raced by.

‘Ivy’ll have some.’

She wanted to get to Ivy. Without thinking, May ran down to the beach. She could see her sister in her bikini, standing gracefully, her weight all balanced on one long leg and angled hip. She was raking back her hair with her fingers and talking to some boys.

When May panted up to her she half-turned, startled, and smiled. ‘This is my sister, May.’

The three boys were standing in a dazzled semi-circle. Of course Ivy drew them like moths with no thought but to incinerate themselves in her flame.

‘This is Lucas, May. And … um …’ She didn’t try to conceal the fact that she hadn’t remembered the names of the others.

‘Joel. And Kevin.’

The middle one fell over himself to supply the information. Ivy gave him a small, considered smile and he blushed. Joel was about sixteen and Kevin a year or so younger. They looked just like the two hundred boys May knew in school in New York, who all wanted to date the same twenty skinny girls. Lucas was different. He was older, perhaps even as old as twenty. He had beige-blond hair pulled back in a pony-tail, a slippery golden tan and a lovers’ knot tattooed on his left bicep. May realised that she was openly staring at him and felt dull colour rising in her face as she dragged her eyes away.

‘Your sister?’ Lucas said in amusement.

May stood with her arms folded across her chest, numbly exposed in her stupid red-and-white swimsuit, feeling the sun hot on the top of her head. ‘Have you got the sun cream?’ she demanded of Ivy. She had forgotten the eeriness of the house. It was time to retreat from all these pairs of eyes. There were two women sitting on rugs only a few yards away and John was strolling across the sand with his hands in the pockets of his khaki shorts.

‘Sure.’ Ivy produced a tube from her straw bag. ‘Want me to rub some on your shoulders?’

‘No thanks,’ May snapped. She took the cream and marched away.

‘And this is my dad,’ she heard Ivy saying.

‘Hi. I’m John Duhane.’

Marian was already on her feet, on her way to greet the newcomer.

‘I’m so pleased someone has taken the Bennisons’ place. I couldn’t bear to think of it sitting empty, with all that sadness trapped inside it. Are the young women your daughters? They’ll make the house laugh again, I know they will.’

John hadn’t yet told Ivy and May about the death of the Bennison girl. It had seemed the last of too many negatives about the whole trip, but now he knew that he should have done so.

For the moment Ivy’s attention was fully occupied by the blond boy. The two of them had already begun to wander away, the younger brothers in attendance.

Marian Beam introduced Leonie, whose arms were full of baby. ‘This is Ashton and that’s Sidonie asleep on the rug.’

‘They’re beautiful,’ John said dutifully. But it was the babies’ mother who held his interest. She had a narrow, brown-skinned face and dark eyes, which met his briefly and slid away. She was pretty in a boyish way, but what struck him about her was the way her face looked tucked in, as if she was used to concealing things.

Marian was saying, ‘There’s plenty of company here for your girls. I’ve got eleven grandchildren altogether, from Lucas down to Ashton, and they all come to spend the summers with me. Is your wife here with you?’

‘I’m a widower.’

And he saw the mother look at him over the baby’s sun-hat. ‘You’re here on your own with them?’ Marian protested. ‘I call that plain heroic.’

‘Or plain foolish,’ John answered and was rewarded by another veiled glance from the daughter-in-law.

‘You must come over and join us whenever you feel like it. How about tonight? My daughter Karyn is here with her partner and Leonie’s husband is here too …’

Ah, John thought. Of course.

‘Unfortunately the other two boys and their families won’t be getting here until later, and you must meet them then.’

‘Perhaps not this evening,’ John said. ‘We should settle in up there first. We only arrived in the middle of the storm last night.’

He looked beyond the frayed brim of Marian’s hat to the Captain’s House. It stood at a slightly different angle from the others, seeming to turn aside from them and away from the full assault of the sea and wind. He could imagine that a seafarer had built it, a man who had had enough of the weather and the elements, but still couldn’t quite leave them behind. May had been standing on the lower deck looking down at them, but now she had disappeared.

Marian was insistent. ‘Tomorrow, what about that? Come over and have a meal with us tomorrow evening.’

‘Thank you, we’d like to.’

‘That’s settled then.’

Evidently Marian Beam was a woman who knew what she wanted and insisted on getting it.

The garden between the sea wall and the deck was not really a garden at all, more a strip of grass and sand, which had been decorated in places with big rounded beach stones and low bushes. May prowled aimlessly around the limits of the area, turning back when she came to the fence painted in faded blue that separated the garden from the one next door. Orange, scarlet and ginger flowers growing on the other side spilled over the fence, making a little oasis of brilliance.

May followed a stony path down the side of the house. There was an outside shower behind a screen, a big evergreen tree with a dilapidated hammock slung from the branches, a coiled-up hosepipe, which stopped her short for a second with its resemblance to a snake. When she recovered her breath and stepped forward again she immediately knew that someone was watching her. She peered behind her and up into the branches of the tree, to the little screened windows in the side of the house. There was no one to see. A cold breath fanned the nape of her neck, even though the day had turned hot.

She turned her head slowly.

The old woman she had seen before was standing on the other side of the fence, half hidden by the green leaves of her garden. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said.

‘You didn’t.’ May was relieved. ‘I saw you before.’

The woman held up a big pair of shears to show May. ‘I’m doing some pruning. Turner’s supposed to come and see to it but he doesn’t always have time to do everything. Turner’s my gardener. My mother loved this garden and I try to look after it for her sake. I suppose it’s a kind of memorial.’