‘Iced tea for me, please. They have good jelly doughnuts,’ Elizabeth advised.
‘Just a Coke. Diet Coke.’
‘You’ll fade away.’
‘I don’t think so.’
When the waitress had put their drinks in front of them Elizabeth asked gently, ‘Is something wrong?’
May was exhausted. Even if she had wanted to, how could she specify one thing when it was everything? ‘No, Nothing.’
‘Are you sure?’
The concern in the old woman’s face affected her, all the pursed lines around her ladylike mouth and the wattly flesh of her throat pulling with the effort to be kind but not intrusive. May was afraid she might, embarrassingly, cry again. It was unthinkable to mention even John or Ivy and Lucas, let alone the feeling she was always trying to hide and duck away from, that the insides of herself were wrong and guilty, and less adequate than everyone else’s.
‘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,