Marty said, ‘Doone Bennison. Would you like to look at them?’
‘Yes, please.’
She undid the tie. There were a dozen photographs, all of Doone alone. In a windbreaker, a polo shirt and in one case a lifejacket with the wind whipping her hair across her cheeks. She had a heavy, rather pasty face with thick eyebrows and a wide mouth, but her smile was transfiguring.
May gazed at her and her eyes fastened on Doone’s as if they were meeting in the flesh. But she was looking at a stranger. Nothing about Doone’s features was familiar, or even remarkable, except for her smile. May was amazed at how happy she looked. ‘She looks … she looks ordinary. Like any girl.’ A stupid thing to say, May thought, as soon as it was out. It was only her deadness that made her any different, and the diary of her love.
Marty was standing at her shoulder, solid and self-assured and detached from all the whispering undercurrents that washed the beach, in the adult way that her father was and the other men from the five houses, except for Lucas. May suddenly felt reproached by his normality. She was clumsy and intrusive, like a voyeur with Doone’s pictures in her hand. She folded them together abruptly and handed them back. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be snooping. It must have been terrible when she drowned.’
‘It was. For everyone at the beach.’
Of course she was still here in their memories, her life and her death. They were all back for the next summer, enjoying their vacations because that was what you did, you carried on with living. Just like she and John and Ivy were doing, even though Alison had died. But Doone would still inhabit the place for the Beams and the Stiegels and the rest. They would remember seeing her on the rocks where Marty had taken her picture and on a towel on the sand, and in the sea that had taken her away. She was there even for May, who had never seen her face until today.
May shivered. Only the thinnest membrane separated the beach people from another multitude that held Doone and Alison and the island woman. The divider was as opaque as a Pittsharbor mist and as insubstantial. Any of them could slip through it. Maybe without even knowing it.
The telephone rang shrilly on the desk. The edge of a startled scream came out of May’s mouth but she pressed her hands over it. Marty’s eyebrows lifted as he answered. After a few words he handed her the receiver. ‘It’s for you. Your father.’
‘Yeah? Hi. Yes, I’m here. How did you know?’
He had been reading on the deck and had seen her going up to the house with Marty, nothing more complicated than that.
John wanted to know if May was going to the harbour with him to watch the Pittsharbor Day fireworks. He made regular overtures of the same kind, giving her the opportunity to talk to him if she wanted to. It left May feeling cornered, keeping the refuge of her silence. ‘I’ve got to go, he wants me,’ she mumbled to Marty.
‘You okay?’
Why were people always asking her that? ‘Yeah, thanks. Thank you for the drink. And letting me see the photos.’
The pictures of Doone were already tucked away again.
After the loss of Martin the bowman from the third mate’s boat, the Dolphin’s days at sea took on a heaviness and a monotony that the lack of wind and whales did nothing to dispel.
A sombre mood possessed every man among the officers and crew, but the worst affected of them all was William Corder. On more than one occasion good-natured Matthias Plant sought him out wherever it was he hid himself, behind the thin curtain of his bunk or up in some sheltered corner of the deck, and tried to raise the boy’s spirits by joking with him, or at the least by persuading him to share the reason for his melancholy. The mate had seen enough deaths in his years of seafaring to be by rights almost immune to tragedy, but still he was enough of a man of feeling to remember how he himself had been affected the first time he had witnessed such a loss. Yet it seemed to Matthias that the boy was overtaken by deeper sadness and anxiety than could be explained even by the terrible death of his shipmate. But whatever method of coaxing Matthias employed on him, William begged only to be left alone and retreated into the silent sanctuary of his own thoughts.
At length Captain Gunnell despaired of the poor hunting around the Congo basin and the whaling grounds of the southern Atlantic sea. He gave orders to his officers to set the Dolphin’s course westwards for the islands of Fernando de Naronha, to the north-east of Brazil. At first a fair wind seemed to promise better fortune, but after not many days the breeze died to a whisper, then failed altogether. A cruel heat descended on the ship and pinned it like an expiring insect to the harsh mirror of the sea. The foul smells and vermin bred by the heat below decks were a torture even to the experienced men, and the lack of fresh food and sweet water began to take their toll on the health of the crew.
William Corder fell ill of a fever. After insisting for two days and a night that he could stand his watch with anyone, he collapsed in a dead faint one morning while kneeling to the task of scrubbing the ship’s decks. The officer of the watch ordered him to be carried below and he was placed in his bunk to recover.
Matthias Plant was the officer of the middle watch on that same night. The sea was dead calm with not so much as a breath of wind stirring and Matthias wearily stretched out his arms on the rail, praying for a wind or at least for some thought of action that would keep his eyes from falling shut in sleep.
One of the men from the watch on deck ducked below, with the intention of lighting up his tobacco pipe at the lamp in the forecastle. A moment later there came a great shout, enough to have roused the whole ship if the sleepers had not been so drugged with heat and lassitude. The man who had gone below burst out of the forecastle scuttle. Matthias could at first make no sense of his babble of words. ‘That young fellow,’ the sailor raved. ‘The one that’s sick and lying below.’
‘What of him?’ Matthias shouted back, fearful that poor William had taken a turn for the worse. ‘Come, out with it. Are you an idiot or a native, that you can’t speak properly?’ For indeed the man was gibbering, hardly able to form his words in a manner to allow understanding. The mate took him by the throat and shook him like a dog with a rat, for his sudden anxiety for William Corder overwhelmed his habitual reason.
At last the sailor found words that could be understood. ‘That young fellow is a woman, sir.’
Matthias gaped at him like a fish, the first time in many years that he had been silenced by one of his own men.
‘Come below,’ the man exhorted him, tugging at his arm. ‘Come below if you will not believe me, and see for yourself.’
Matthias followed him at once. It was all quiet below decks save for the faint creaking of the timbers as the ship made slow headway over the flat water. The young creature they had known as William Corder lay in his bunk, with the lamp shining in on him. In the stifling heat of the night and with the burning of his fever he had thrown off his clothes, and now lay exposed to the eyes of his rough companions as a perfect and beautifully made young woman. She was lying there in restless sleep with the sheen of sweat upon her white skin.
The commotion on the deck had drawn the rest of the watch crowding into the forecastle and the watch below were stirring drowsily in their places.
Matthias swiftly pulled the curtain to shield the woman. He dispatched one of the men to rouse the Captain and sent the others back to their places in short order. He bent over the young woman and drew the tumbled bed-things over her body. Her eyelids were already fluttering, and she gave a low moan and came fully awake. Her eyes fixed on Matthias’s face with a flash of terror, then such speechless pleading that it brought a pang to his heart the like of which he had not felt since he was a young man newly in love. ‘Come,’ he said, almost adding William. ‘Your secret is discovered. This is no place for you. You must make yourself respectable and come with me to the Captain, who will see what should be done to help you.’ And all the time his mind was running over the almost incredible fact that this young woman had spent so many weeks living alongside the coarsest