May wondered if she had inadvertently strayed on to some sort of forbidden ground. She didn’t like the look of Aaron Fennymore very much. He was stern, yet alarmingly frail – ill-looking. As if he might die or something.
Marian clapped her hands and walked between the groups. She was wearing a tiered hippie skirt and the toenails of her faintly grubby feet were painted ripe purple. ‘Everything’s ready, plates are right here. You have to help yourselves, now, no ceremony. We’re just family, John.’
Aaron Fennymore’s white head jerked and his wife patted his hand. ‘I’ll fix you a plate,’ she soothed him.
‘Go on,’ Elizabeth said to May. ‘You’ll be hungry.’
‘Not really,’ May said coldly, while her stomach clamoured for hamburger.
The food was barbecued with some aplomb by Tom Beam, aided by Lucas, and served up by Lucas’s laid-back friends from Pittsharbor. Leonie always let Tom do the cooking. He ran two successful restaurants in Boston, and he had precise ideas about the right way to do anything connected with food. She sat back in one of the canvas loungers, wondering vaguely when the salt-rotted fabric would finally tear apart and deposit her on the deck. The size of the gathering allowed her to feel that for once she needn’t make a particular effort to be cheerful and talkative. No one would notice if she withdrew and let her thoughts wander.
Everyone had eaten and Tom made regular circuits of the adults with the bottles of Californian Merlot. Lucas and his friends, and his sister Gail and Ivy, drank beer. Marian looked pleased with her success in having been the one to draw the new people into the little society of the bluff. They would be her protégés now and she liked that.
Marian had stopped to listen courteously to something Elizabeth Newton was saying. Leonie knew that privately Marian considered Elizabeth to be an old Boston snob and an anachronism, but she was always polite to her in public. Maybe they were talking about the land behind the beach and the development. Elizabeth’s son Spencer and his partner wanted to buy a piece to build condominiums, but Aaron owned it and flatly refused to sell. Elizabeth tried to promote Spencer’s cause whenever she could and she was well aware that Marian’s relationship with the Fennymores was more cordial than her own.
Leonie drew up her knees and rested her chin on them. She was happy watching without having to respond to anyone. She saw her husband lean down to say something to Karyn and their physical likeness struck her all over again. All Marian’s children resembled her and one another. Their wide, handsome faces with broad foreheads and big noses might have come from the same mould. Karyn was dark like her mother, whereas Tom had inherited his father’s sandy fairness and prominent chin, but they were unmistakably brother and sister. They laughed now, the same noisy burst of amusement that was the signature sound of Beam family gatherings. Leonie’s gaze travelled on at once.
The sky over the sea had turned pistachio green and now the light was fading into navy-blue darkness. The teenagers had begun to talk about taking a boat out to the island and lighting a fire, so they could carry on their own party there.
‘Aw, c’mon, we’ve done it plenty before,’ Joel was protesting to Tom and Marian.
Leonie did not try to intervene. The older of the two sisters from the Bennisons’ place was as graceful as a gazelle, but she was wearing too much make-up for a summer’s evening and her eyes were bold to the point of hardness. The younger one with the round, sweet face hovered watchfully at one side. She kept tugging at the hem of her shorts as if she wanted to cover herself up. Leonie wondered how long ago their mother had died.
Their father moved around the circle, making a polite point of talking to everyone. He had sat for a long time with the Fennymores and now he was nodding in the midst of a brief conversation with Elliot. Watching them, Leonie reached down and groped unseeingly for the glass of wine beside her chair. She finished what was left of it, her third of the evening. She didn’t often drink more than one. Abstemiousness over food and drink was part of her carefulness, her exercising of control in all the areas of her life that remained susceptible to control.
The children began a shift down the beach steps. Marian and Tom moved in their wake, issuing warnings and instructions. The sea was calm and the tide was right, so they had been given permission to row across to the island. Leonie saw how the younger Duhane girl waited until her sister motioned her on with a hitch of her chin. Then she followed on after Kevin and Joel, who took no notice of her. They clattered down the steps and out of sight and the adults came back into the circle, simultaneously smiling and shaking their heads.
‘They’ll be okay. You can’t stop them doing everything because of what happened,’ Tom proclaimed to no one in particular.
‘May I sit here?’ someone asked.
Leonie turned her head and saw it was John Duhane. She was convinced that he had taken care to talk to everyone else except her because he had been saving her until last. ‘Please do.’
At first, he didn’t say anything at all. They sat in companionable silence watching the glow of candles around the deck and as the quiet stretched between them Leonie let her head fall back once more against the salty chair canvas. A thin wire loosened between her shoulder-blades and her breathing steadied. The murmur of the sea grew louder.
When he did speak it was in a low voice that she had to turn her head to hear. He was telling her his daughters had been reluctant to make this trip and how pleased he was that there were other young people for them to be with. ‘Vacations have been the hardest part to deal with since their mother died.’ He spoke softly but without hesitation.
‘How long ago?’
‘Four years now.’
‘I’m sorry. They must miss her. And you must too,’ she added hastily, disconcerted to discover that she sounded clumsy.
John was sitting on the edge of the decking. He reached down to the coarse grass arching beside his ankle and pinched a blade between his thumb and forefinger.
‘One of the babes is crying,’ Marian called. There was a nursery alarm plugged in close to the porch door. Karyn swayed past and the hem of her skirt brushed over John’s arm. A moment later she came out again with Ashton in her arms. His dark pin-curled head lolled and his thumb was wedged in his mouth. Over her shoulder his wet saucer eyes blinked at the world with tearful reproach.
John moved a little to one side, but Leonie sat motionless with her hands locked behind her head. ‘They’re beautiful children,’ he said. ‘You don’t believe they will ever grow up, do you? But they do. They grow up and they stop thinking you’re the best person in the world. Overnight you become the enemy.’
Leonie followed his surprised gaze as Karyn went to Elliot. Elliot took the bundle of damp baby and unconcernedly rocked it and went on talking. She made a small sound that might have been laughter, or something altogether different. ‘Oh, I see. You thought they were mine? From the beach, yesterday morning? No, they’re Karyn’s kids. Elliot’s her partner, obviously. My husband is Tom.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It’s a natural assumption to make, a woman with a baby in her arms.’
‘So which of all those children are yours?’
‘None of them. Tom and I don’t have any.’
‘Ah.’
Leonie stood up. A spoon that had been hidden in the folds of her skirt clattered to the decking but no one looked round. She retrieved it and replaced it with the others. ‘Will you come for a walk on the beach? Just ten minutes?’ she asked abruptly, without having pre-planned the invitation in her mind.
‘Of course.’
They crossed the deck and descended the steps without anyone seeming to notice their withdrawal.
Once they were there, Leonie kicked off her sandals and hooked her forefinger through the straps. The sand was pleasantly cool and coarse