‘I guess there is,’ May whispered.
She rested her aching head against the high back of the sofa. Instead of closing her eyes she began to talk in a low whisper.
She told Marty about not wanting to come on the family vacation to Pittsharbor with her father and sister, because they were only pretending to be a family nowadays. She told him about the bedroom in the Captain’s House and the French bed, and the way she sometimes felt safe and sometimes trapped in there.
Tentatively at first, then in a stream of words so fast they tangled themselves in her mouth she told him about the woman on the island and Elizabeth’s story about her, and about her fear, and her conviction that Doone was separated from all of them only by the thinnest dimensions of time and space, which shivered and paled, and threatened to dissolve.
Marty was right, he was an excellent listener. He took in the flood without moving or interrupting, watching May’s face.
‘I thought I saw something moving in the trees up there.’
He nodded. ‘I understand exactly. I feel the same, sometimes. In fact I thought I saw Doone on the beach tonight,’ he murmured. ‘But it was you. Moonlight plays tricks.’
A tremor passed through May. Marty took hold of her hand and patted it in reassurance. ‘Imagination is a powerful force, especially in a place like this, which is governed by tide and wind and fog. Of course it works to shift reality into a different dimension. The effects of a vivid imagination like yours or mine can be fearful or delightful. Or both.’
It was only imagination working. That was better to hear than Elizabeth’s unsettling bits of history and personal experience. ‘Can I tell you what I was really afraid of?’
He came closer. ‘Go ahead.’
Here in the pleasant room, with Justine’s baby toys in a basket and the music playing, it was almost easy to admit to it. May half smiled at herself. ‘I thought… I was afraid that somehow I was becoming Doone. That the differences between what we are and what we did were so blurred that she was taking me over. I thought, you know, that I liked Lucas because she had done. I thought everything was connected together and I started worrying about what was going to happen to me in the end.’
Marty was smiling too. ‘You’re nothing like her.’
The reassurance was welcome even though she had heard it before. She sighed with the relief of having confessed her fears and in doing so making them seem small and irrational. Her headache made her roll her head sideways and Marty helped her to cushion it on his shoulder. May let the comfort of his attention wash over her. He was like her father, without the collisions and misunderstandings that governed her relationship with John.
May said, ‘I found her diary hidden in our bedroom.’
Marty settled his chin against her hair. She heard the gentle exhalation of his breath. ‘Did you?’
‘It was hidden in a hole in the wall.’
‘Did you read it?’
‘Yes. After I’d tried not to for a couple of days. That was when it began, when I started feeling that she was too close to me.’
‘Why was that, do you think?’
‘Half of it was stuff about school and friends, and her mother. Just like I’d write if I kept a diary. Except about my mother. But the rest of it was different. She was in love and she wrote about it so weirdly. For her it was either despair or wild happiness. I thought the guy must be Lucas.’
‘But didn’t she say so?’
Marty was so close that his breath was warm and moist on her cheek. The comfortable feeling left her, replaced by a tingle of unease. She lifted her head and edged away, and at the same time she heard a floorboard creak overhead.
‘No. Quite a lot of what she wrote was in code.’
‘Go on,’ he said softly.
‘There isn’t any more to tell.’ May folded her arms.
Marty moved back to the opposite corner of the sofa. He lifted his glass to his mouth, but put it down again without drinking. Upstairs, Justine began to wail. ‘I’ve got to go up,’ he said. His expression had become both eager and submissive in a way that intensified May’s uneasiness. She had a sense that there were fetid adult concerns here, which were at the same time too close to her. The hairs at the nape of her neck prickled, recalling the different sensations Lucas had stirred up.
Justine’s wail became a louder cry.
‘I’m going,’ May assured him. ‘I’ll go the front way, along the lane.’ Marty was barring her way. ‘I’ll be okay. It’s only a couple of steps,’ she promised.
‘Does anyone else know about what you found?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t let it upset you, May.’
‘I won’t,’ she breathed. Marty was already on his way to Justine. May said good-night and let herself out in the opposite direction from where she had come, through the door that faced towards the Pittsharbor road.
As she slipped past the Stiegels’ black Lexus she saw through the tangle of hedge that there were lights and people outside the Fennymores’ house. She reached the lane and looked past the tree where Aaron had once surprised her.
An ambulance was drawn up at the porch steps and paramedics in blue coveralls were lifting a loaded stretcher into the back. Hannah hurried out in her brown coat and climbed in beside it. One of the men secured the doors and took his place in the seat at the front. The engine started up and the headlamps swung over the ragged grass, so May instinctively ducked out of sight behind the hedge. She shrank further when the ambulance had rolled past her. Someone else was coming out of the house, stopping to lock the door and hurrying towards the lane.
It was Marian. She fled unseeingly past May but May saw her clearly and she was weeping helplessly.
John was reading in the shadowy room, but he threw his magazine aside as soon as May came in. ‘Where have you been? I was about to come out looking for you.’
‘I just went for a walk.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going to be out for hours?’ He came across to her and tilted her face towards the light.
May pulled away from him. There had been too much touching tonight and her skin felt bruised by it, although it wasn’t the kind of damage that her father would be able to see. She hid her bitten lip behind her hand. ‘So, where’s Ivy?’
‘That’s not the point. Ivy’s adult and you aren’t, not yet. May, why can’t you talk to me?’
There was accusation in his eyes and pleading, when she didn’t want to see either. She wanted reassurance. If she were still a little girl she wouldn’t have to understand any of the things that had happened to her tonight. But John was failing her. Even though he insisted she was a child he couldn’t make anything right for her and wasn’t that what fathers were supposed to do for their children?
She had seen him through this window, which now admitted black sky into the room, except for the pane that was blank with cardboard. His arms wound around Leonie Beam and his face different, distorted and remote. Even the thought of it made her feel sick. And it gave her the old crawling sense within her head, in some dark cavity, that there was something connected but even worse. She would do anything, violent or craven, so long as she didn’t have to turn round and see what it was.
John hadn’t kept Ali safe, had he? How could he shield her either, from anything, when all the time she could read his weakness in his eyes? He wanted things from her, to know that she was all right, when it should be the other way round.
Dr Metz had told her that it was okay to be angry and it was anger that made her say coldly, ‘I don’t