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.
In as careless a voice as she could manage she demanded, ‘So what happened to him? The other guy?’
‘He married, not so long afterwards, and had children too.’
The waitress brought the check and laid it on the table beneath Elizabeth’s saucer.
May snatched it up and glared angrily at the total. ‘Why did you tell me this?’ she demanded. She felt close to tears again, unable to deal with the way Elizabeth’s loneliness and long-ago hurt nudged and pressed against her. She felt too fragile to withstand it.
‘Because