Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies

Leonie was sitting twenty yards away with Tom at her side. He didn’t often sit on the beach doing nothing, but he had already done his run to Pittsharbor and back, and there wasn’t enough wind for sailing. She watched Marty saunter over to the volleyball and saw Judith settle again to her book. The busy details of the beach, the specks of colour against the sea and sky, and the air’s relentless clarity made her feel as if she were in a Victorian picture. One of the minor English pre-Raphaelites perhaps, painstakingly observed but lacking in emotion. It was not a comfortable feeling. She longed to make something happen, some undisciplined smear of brilliance in the centre of the canvas, and at the same time she dreaded the impulse.

Tom folded the Wall Street Journal vertically into three. Leonie realised her arms were wrapped so tightly around her knees that the muscles of her shoulders were burning. She dropped her hands and kneaded fistfuls of warm dry sand instead. ‘I’ve hardly seen you this vacation,’ she said.

He looked up for a second, not quite audibly sighing. ‘You know how it is in the restaurants. This summer more than ever.’

‘Tom, are you seeing someone else?’ The question came out of nowhere. Once it was spilt it was like a drop of acid, smoking, then burning a hole in the sheet of their tolerance.

‘No.’

She saw that it was the truth. Or at least near enough to the truth to allow his face to blaze with indignation. ‘Are you?’ he countered.

Leonie shook her head. It was the same. Technically innocent, but the smooth surface of honesty was so undermined with the burrowings of despair and dissatisfaction that it must soon collapse.

‘That’s okay, then.’

He was going to turn back to his paper, but she wouldn’t let him. Not now there was a blur right in the middle of the day’s pretty canvas. ‘Do you feel like a walk?’ Leonie suggested.

He considered. ‘I’ll come with you.’

Not I’d like to, she noticed. But doing her a favour.

They skirted the edge of the water, walking with a space of solid air between them. Leonie wondered if John Duhane had turned to watch from under the brim of his panama hat. The dull weight of unhappiness made her hunch her shoulders with self-dislike. There was no reason for this misery, she thought. Or only the old reason that couldn’t be discussed any longer and therefore apparently did not exist. The fact that she couldn’t be happy with all she had was turning her life rancid. And Tom’s, too; the blight was not limited to herself.

They were following the route of the walk she had taken with John. Leonie didn’t want to retrace those comfortable steps in ugly silence. When they had rounded the first headland they came to a narrow inlet lined with rock and pungent with steaming rockweed. At the head was a gritty tongue of sand choked with the grey skeletons of dead trees. She sat down suddenly on the sand. With one hand she gathered some stones and pitched them one by one into the slapping water. Tom hovered behind her for a moment, then sat down a few feet away.

When they had first known each other, their earliest summer together, Tom and Leonie had sometimes taken a walk this way to escape from the rest of the family. Once or twice they had slipped deeper into the spruce wood and found a bed of moss to lie on. They had clung to one another, laughing and whispering like conspirators.

Leonie frowned now, trying to recall exactly how love had felt. A state of greedy inclusion.

She looked sideways at Tom. His face was set in the expression she was too familiar with – unyielding, with the corners of his mouth drawing sharp lines down his cheeks. Sadness and sympathy for him suddenly took hold of her and on an impulse she reached out and put her hand on his arm. He didn’t acknowledge her touch. ‘Do you remember we used to make love in the woods?’ she asked.

‘I remember you saying you felt overheard in our bedroom.’

It was true, but it pricked her that he chose to make it a criticism.

Marian had not put them in Tom’s old childhood bedroom. She had told them that his was too shabby, too cramped to be shared with Leonie, but the new room was also much closer to hers. As if it were as near as she could get to insinuating herself between them.

‘Anyway. It was lovely up here,’ Leonie said lamely, drawing back her hand. She had wanted to be Tom’s wife, but she had ended up in unequal partnership with his mother and his siblings and his businesses.

Tom didn’t answer. He was staring at the sea.

A wave of anger broke and washed over the swell of Leonie’s sympathy. Her husband was mean-spirited and neglectful. If there was guilt it was his, not hers.

So far, she thought with a little shudder of black excitement. So far. ‘What are we going to do?’ She made it clear that she wasn’t asking about tennis versus sailing.

Tom still didn’t look at her. Why? she wanted to shout at him. Just because I can’t grow us a baby, do you have to cut me off altogether?

After a long interval, he answered, ‘Nothing.’

She thought she knew him well, but even so she was shocked by the extent of his withdrawal. Then, just as she had understood over a plate of cherries in Sandy’s Bar that she and Tom didn’t love each other any more, another huge truth dawned on her.

Tom wouldn’t initiate any split between them. He wouldn’t be the cause of it, or even a collaborator. He would not demonise himself in the eyes of his family by dismembering even such a rudimentary and unblessed union as his with Leonie. She would have to be the villain.

The simplicity of it caused her to nod her head, even though her eyes burned.

He wouldn’t even fight properly with her now. They had escaped from the beach to the seclusion of the woods, not for sex any more, but they couldn’t even take the opportunity to yell at each other. A longing for a real war swelled in her throat, a vicious one that would rip their separate protective layers and expose the flesh, after which there could be a truce and maybe a reconciliation. ‘Nothing?’ She began to shout: ‘Jesus, Tom, what are you? It’s like living with some fucking rock formation. Don’t you care what happens to us?’

His face was turned away from her.

Slowly, Leonie wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Speak. Say something.’

He did look at her then. Articulating slowly, pushing out the words between his teeth, he said, ‘You can’t have a baby. You’re not the only woman in the world to suffer it. Grow up, Leonie. Get on with your life.’

‘I don’t think it’s just about babies any more,’ she whispered. Get on with my life. Is that really what he wants?

When there was no response she tried, ‘Can’t we talk about adoption?’

‘We have talked about it. I don’t want to adopt.’

It was true. Through sleepless nights and dry-mouthed car journeys, and dinners that turned into a wasteland of crumbed table-cloths they had followed the same thread. Now they had wound their way into the heart of the labyrinth only to find there was no heart. There was only a blank wall and nowhere to go beyond it.

The desire for a fight had gone out of her. She was left with little except an aversion to the stink of rockweed and the boneyard of dead trees. A fisherman in his lobster boat puttered across the middle distance, turning a furrow of white water as he rounded in on his floats. ‘Okay,’ she said flatly. As an ending it couldn’t have been less of a whisper. ‘I think I’ll walk back now.’

Leonie stood up, straightening her back because sitting hunched over had put a crease in it. Above her she saw a woman steadily climbing the slope away from the shore. Her pale-coloured clothing showed like a shaft of light between the dark verticals of the spruce trunks. It was uncomfortable to think that she might have overheard them. ‘There’s someone up there. It must be one of the Kellys.’ She remembered the name of the people who owned the isolated cottage set up on a ridge above the inlet.

Tom didn’t look. ‘No, the Kellys never come up here in August. They think it’s too crowded.’

‘They must have let the place, then.’ The woman had moved out of sight now.

‘If they have, it’s the first time in living memory,’ Tom said coldly, as if it was a matter of importance.

Leonie bent her head. After a minute she scrambled away from him up the ledges of rock and began the walk back to the beach.

There came a day not so long after the Dolphin crossed the Line when Captain Gunnell ordered the boats down. The look-out had sung out at the sighting of a pair of good whales, a cow and a calf, about a mile to leeward of the ship. It was a bright day with a good sea running and the oarsmen soon brought the boats to the spot where the cow had sounded.

Matthias Plant gave the order to his men to rest easy. At the prow the boat steerer was ready with his harpoon and all was silent as they waited upon the whale.

Of a sudden there came a great boiling of the water to the stem of the boat as she blew, and it seemed but a second after that her great head reared up and Matthias’s boat was caught dead in her eye. Her jaws were open wide but Heggy Burris the boat steerer did not delay an instant in hurling the iron true to the flank, where it lodged fast. Some blood ran from the wound but the beast seemed not to feel it, for all her attention was fixed on the fate of her calf.

Another boat had got the calf fast and it thrashed pathetically enough in the swell, its head dipping beneath the water as its life faded and a great wash of its blood darkened the sea.

The sight launched the mother whale into a transport. Her back arched into a mountain standing proud of the water between the boats and the dying calf. Then Burris was forward with his second iron, thrown as true as the first and the lines made a great run as her flukes went up and beat the water into a torrent of spray, which left the men blinded for an instant.

Matthias shouted, ‘Forward, forward all!’

The line begin to whip out of the tubs and the experienced hands knew for sure she was going away, an ugly whale that might lead them the dance of all their lives.

Then there was a scream that would sound in every man’s dreams until his dying day, as the line fouled and a loop of it caught around the body of Martin the bowman as he bent over his oar.