‘I saw them taking Mr Fennymore off in an ambulance.’
‘When?’
‘Just a few minutes ago.’
‘Poor Mr Fennymore.’
The telephone began to ring and over the insistent noise May said she was going up to her room. Her foot was on the bottom stair when she heard her father answering. After the first hello his voice changed. It was Leonie, obviously.
In the bathroom she ran the bath water at full velocity to block out all possible sound and stripped off her clothes. With one foot she nudged the crumpled heap into a corner. Her body felt polluted and ingrained with dirt. When the bath was full to overflowing she reluctantly turned off the taps. There was silence from downstairs.
She stepped into the hot water and slowly lay down. It crept over her skin until it engulfed her. May let her head sink back until her face swam beneath the surface and her hair fanned out like seaweed. She let out a sigh of bubbles from between her lips.
It would be another hot day, but as yet there was a whitish mist blotting out the sky and sea. The horizon quivered between the two in parallel pale lines of grey and pearl, and the unmoving air was thick with salt. The gulls on the beach stalked and pecked at their wavering reflections in the low-water pools but Leonie stared beyond them at the confines of the bay.
She saw a lobster boat drawing a diagonal line from the headland to the corner of Moon Island. It slid out of her sight behind the outlying rocks but the pulse of the outboard, more subcutaneous vibration than sound, stayed with her for a long minute afterwards. It was a year ago this morning that she had stood with a brown bag of shopping in her arms, watching Doug Hanscom’s boat bring Doone ashore.
A jogger down on the beach reached the steps at the southern end and began the climb upwards. It was Tom, on his morning way into Pittsharbor.
Leonie opened the screen door from the porch, closed it behind her and stood looking into the centre of the house. The wide, shallow stairway with scuffed matting led up from the big hall. On either side two tall, foursquare rooms were filled with white morning light. It was a good house, solid and benign, and untidily comfortable with the well-used and unfussy things that Marian had filled it with. And Leonie was thinking as she walked through the quiet space that she felt about it just as she felt about Marian herself. She could appreciate all the qualities, but she had never been able to make appreciation warm into affection.
In the kitchen she toasted an English muffin and spread it with cranberry jelly. The sunlight cut through the jelly on the blade of the knife to make it shine like a jewel, and it warmed the yellow Formica of the worktops with their edges eroded like a geological formation to reveal the brown and white strata within. Leonie touched everything gently, the handle of the knife, the ridged knobs of the cupboard doors and the taps over the old sink. In Tom’s absence, in his continued and unbroken absence even though they had slept side by side, she was saying goodbye.
She sat down at the kitchen table to eat her muffin and watched the sky beyond the windows. The peace didn’t last long.
Elliot came down the stairs with Ashton in his arms and Sidonie skipping in front of him. ‘You’re up early,’ he said.
Sidonie squirmed up on to a chair and turned a radiant smile on Leonie. ‘Banana me,’ she wheedled.
‘D’you mind, Leonie?’ Elliot asked over his shoulder.
‘Of course not.’
When did I ever mind? I am Aunt Leonie, infertile but obedient.
As Elliot put the baby into his seat Leonie mashed a banana in a saucer. She put a spoon into Sidonie’s fist, breathing in her early-morning unwashed smell of innocent sleep. Sidonie began to eat and the intensity of childish concentration moved Leonie as it always did. Out of Elliot’s sight, under the table, she clenched her empty hands.
Richard was the next to appear, yawning in his bathrobe. ‘Tom gone running?’
‘Yes.’ The question was superfluous. When did Tom ever relax his rigid routines?
The smell of coffee brought Karyn and Shelly downstairs, and two of the younger children who argued about tennis games over their bowls of Cheerios. The noise level rose and Leonie sat within her bubble of isolation and let it break over her. At home in Boston she always ate breakfast alone and in silence. Tom usually stayed in bed longer because he left later for work.
It seemed inconceivable now that she had ever tried to be one of the Beams, let alone kept on trying for so long. Determination was crystallising inside her. It tasted like elation salted with fear.
Usually none of the older children appeared until long after breakfast, but this morning Lucas slouched in in his shorts and creased T-shirt. His hair hung down around his face and when he leant over Leonie for the milk he gave off a powerful waft of sweat and stale alcohol. He yawned. ‘Is Grammer all right after last night?’
Karyn scraped a ribbon of yoghurt from Ashton’s chin. ‘What d’you mean? What happened last night?’
‘I thought I was the last one in but Grammer came back a few minutes after me. Mrs Fennymore had called up to ask for some help. The old man was taken ill. They hauled him off to the hospital.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Karyn said. ‘That’s really tough.’
They heard Marian coming down the stairs and fell silent as they waited for her, all of them looking at the door. She appeared in a tom silk kimono with her hair standing out in a thick mass of grey and silver coils. Her face was marked with creases and there were dark pouches under her eyes.
Her children made themselves busy around her and even the grandchildren paused for a second in their intake of breakfast. Marian was irritable and rejected the coffee Shelly gave her as too weak. She rebuked Lucas for being only half dressed, before settling at the table in the place she always occupied. She answered their questions about Aaron in a sharp voice.
He had had severe breathing difficulties, and had become ill and distressed. Hannah had called for an ambulance, then telephoned Marian. ‘She was distressed herself. I went to help, that’s all. There wasn’t much I could do.’
Leonie watched her. There was a difference in Marian this morning that she couldn’t quite place. The kitchen was too full, there was too much light and noise and talk. Marian drank her coffee and pulled her kimono more securely around her bulk. After she had finished she went to the telephone, but there was no reply from the Fennymores.
‘Hannah must be still at the hospital.’
She brushed aside the questions and went out of the porch door, leaving her children mutely raising eyebrows at each other.
Leonie dutifully loaded plates and knives into the dishwasher and swept crumbs off the Formica into her cupped hand. Each small action took on significance for being the last time she would do it here. Today she would have to leave. She felt the potential energy spring-loaded inside her, surely just enough of it to carry her away and out of the gravitational field of Pittsharbor. Beyond that, she had no idea.
She found Marian sitting alone on the cluttered porch. The old wicker chair with a beard of broken cane hanging beneath the seat was her favourite. Marian’s eyes were fixed on the sea and her arms hung heavily over the chair arms, with the dirty diamonds of her rings looking like marine encrustations on the bay rocks. She didn’t hear Leonie approaching, or see her stop and lean against one of the porch pillars with her arms folded.
Although she had followed her mother-in-law out to the secluded corner, Leonie didn’t know what she wanted to say to her, exactly. It was just that there should be at least some acknowledgement between them of the decline and wastage of her marriage, some honest transaction made and recorded for the future.