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

Leonie tried to dispel it, to rub some warmth back into Marian’s hand. ‘Can I do anything?’ she whispered.

Marian inclined her head. The possibility of a connection stirred between them. Marian felt it too, it was obvious that she did. Leonie thought, Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we can talk to each other. I haven’t tried very hard. I will if she’ll let me. The beginnings of a smile twitched at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

Marian’s head lifted again and she stared at Leonie. ‘Do anything? No, I don’t think so.’

The possibility had been there, lying in the no man’s land between them, and she had seen it and chosen not to pick it up. Not only was it too late, the entire night had passed and now the day was coming round again.

Slowly Leonie let go of her hand. She sat back on her heels with cramp twisting her leg muscles and shook her head as if to clear it after a ringing slap. ‘You never liked me, did you?’

Sidonie had wandered on to the porch. She stood at the top of the steps looking out over the water in her pink dress and jelly shoes. One fist twisted up the hem of the frock, showing her pants underneath. The jet-black spirals on her forehead lifted a little. A breeze had sprung up off the sea and the tentative white mist would soon be gone.

Marian had the grace to look startled. ‘You’re Tom’s wife. Of course I like you, Leonie. It goes much deeper than that, you’re family.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Leonie stood up, looking down on the fuzzy grey circle at the crown of Marian’s head, all the sympathy gone out of her. ‘I think you and I disliked each other from the beginning. The shame is that neither of us ever had the guts or the wit to own up to it. If we had done we might have fought about it, or even laughed at ourselves.’

Richard wandered out with his coffee cup, and Karyn appeared, scooped up Sidonie and ran inside again. ‘What’s happening?’ Richard asked, without much interest.

‘Leonie’s upset.’

‘I’m not upset,’ she answered. The stored-up energy was suddenly released. It carried her along in a seductive rush. ‘In fact, I’m happy. I’m very happy because I’m going to walk out of here right now and I’m never coming back to this place again. I’ve had it with family parties and being an auntie, and a good daughter-in-law. I’m a failure at all of that and at being Tom’s wife as well, although God knows I’ve tried hard enough.’

Marian’s face contained three perfect circles of shock and amazement, and when she looked at him Leonie saw that Richard’s expression mirrored his mother’s exactly. They were so alike, they were so fucking identical, all the Beams.

Enough. In her outburst she had sounded just as petulant as Gail or one of the even younger ones. It was time to go, before the Beams or the beach itself finished her off. She half turned in the stunned silence and saw an arrangement of helmet crab and conch shells against the porch rail. She had always hated the beachiness of them, and now she picked up a shell in each hand and hurled them one after another in a curving trajectory towards the edge of the bluff. As if to smash the mirror of the sea. Of course, they fell far short even of the drop down to the beach. They bounced and rolled harmlessly in the seagrass.

A tide of elation and cathartic fury carried Leonie the few steps to the porch door. She opened it and closed it behind her with elaborate care. In the kitchen there was another silence, with adults and children frozen in their places. They couldn’t have heard from here what had actually happened outside, but the atmospheric shock waves had rippled a warning all through the house.

Leonie picked up Tom’s car keys from the counter top. Her own car was back in Boston. He always insisted it was pointless to have two cars up at the beach, even though when he went on one of his trips back to the city it left her without independent transport. Her handbag, luckily, was where she had left it yesterday on a chair on top of a pile of magazines. She dropped the keys inside and swung the strap of the bag over her shoulder.

‘Leonie …’ began Shelly, who was not a Beam and therefore might have been an ally, but still managed not to be.

Leonie didn’t wait to hear her. She went out again into the high hallway and looked up the stairs towards their bedroom, Tom’s bedroom as it had always properly been, thinking about clothes and a suitcase. But then, through the narrow glass panes of the front door, she saw Tom himself coming between the dogwood bushes towards the house. The sight gave her a slight shock, as though she had already placed him somewhere else.

He opened the door, one arm crooked around a bag of croissants and the newspaper.

‘Good run?’ she asked.

She was blocking his way but he side-stepped around her, already moving towards the kitchen. ‘Yes, thanks.’

‘They’re all in there. Everyone’s in the kitchen except Marian and Richard, who are out on the porch.’

He hadn’t even looked at her. But even if he had done, if he had faced her properly and taken account of her it would have been too late. The sweet stream of liberation was running too strongly.

‘Are you going out?’

‘Yes, Tom. I’m going out.’

And with that she left the house. In the sunlight, which had now grown strong, she passed the rusting cage of the tennis court and the bushes that separated the garden from Elizabeth Newton’s. Each successive footstep was lighter and faster. Tom’s elderly Saab was parked nearest to the lane. She slid into the driver’s seat and adjusted the incline and the rear-view mirror to make it hers. As she reversed, then nosed forward into the road, she looked back at the house; the door was firmly closed and no one had come outside to follow her or try to stop her. Leonie realised she was panting for breath as if she had been running.

She drove down the lane, away from Tom and Marian, and the Captain’s House, and the malign curve of the beach with the hungry glitter of sea-water beyond it. She slowed as she passed the Fennymores’, but there was no one to be seen there either.

She took the south-westerly road out of Pittsharbor. When she had put five miles between herself and the beach she relaxed the tension in her braced arms and let her shoulders rest against the seat back. She waited for the undertow of guilt and anxiety, but nothing came. There was only relief.

After another five miles she turned on the radio and searched across the local news and country music stations and weather reports until she came across the voice of Alanis Morissette. Leonie drove on, singing softly, with no idea where she was heading.

The first sign for the upcoming freeway startled her. She had automatically followed the route home – not home any longer, but towards Boston.

She didn’t in the least want to go back there. She braked suddenly and swung in to the side of the road, causing the Ford station-wagon behind her to sweep by in an angry diminuendo of hooting. In the past she might have reddened in belated apology, but now she merely shrugged and wound the wheel in the opposite direction. She took the next turning at random, then another, driving deeper into countryside she had never penetrated before until she had no idea even whether she was headed north or south. The fuel gauge blinked an amber light at her and she frowned back at it, unwilling to have her shapeless reverie broken.

A sign ahead indicated that she was coming to the town of Haselboro. She had never heard of it, and it looked a small, sleepy place as she drove past the neat lawns and white gates of the outlying houses. Although she had eaten the muffin and cranberry jelly for breakfast she realised suddenly that she was ravenously hungry.

Haselboro didn’t have much of a centre. There was a dingy supermarket down a slip road and a garage opposite it across a wider section of the through road. Leonie pulled into the garage forecourt beside the gas pumps and a boy in blue coveralls emerged at once. ‘Fill it up.’ She smiled at him. He had longish hair the same colour as Lucas’s and a face buckled with shyness. Leonie rummaged in her bag and brought out her wallet. There were only fifteen dollars in cash, but she had her credit cards and bank book.

‘Going far?’ the boy asked, not quite looking up from the fuel nozzle.

‘Yes. Well, no. Not really. I’m not quite sure where I am.’

He did squint round at her then. ‘Got a map, have you?’

‘No, actually.’

‘There’s one in there, if you want to have a look. I can’t give it to you, it’s not mine.’ He pointed towards the shop door.

‘Just a glance would be a help.’

The map lay on a counter near the cash till, with a half-eaten hot-dog oozing ketchup into a paper napkin alongside it. Leonie looked longingly at the bitten frankfurter as she flipped the map open. She fumbled the route from Pittsharbor with her forefinger, trying to trace the roads she must have followed in her meander. At length she located Haselboro. To her surprise it was only a couple of miles from the coast. She had driven a sprawling U north-eastwards from Pittsharbor.

The boy materialised at her shoulder.

‘I’m sorry, I interrupted your lunch.’

‘It’s okay.’ He blushed as he busied himself with her credit card.

‘Where can I get one of those?’

‘Huh?’

‘A hot-dog.’

‘Oh, there’s a store down the next street. It’s more of a grocery store, they don’t really sell hot-dogs but I’m sure they’d fix you one if you asked. It’s my mom working there. Say I told you to come by.’

‘Well, thank you, um …’

‘Roger.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Roger.’

‘And you, ma’am.’