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

of rain. Aware that her silhouette against the light would be visible to anyone outside, she reached up and clicked off the switch. There was no one out there to see her, of course, but she felt easier in the dark. Until the sudden crack of thunder came the only sounds were the measured ticking of the long-case clock and the rain. Her hand held the cord of the curtains, ready to draw them and close out the storm. Then she leant forward, peering into the dark. The headlights of a car were veering slowly along the road.

      Elizabeth stood still. The beam of the lights came closer and swept across her windows, before turning towards the gateway of the Captain’s House. She heard the engine stop and through the drumming of the rain a car door slammed.

      Another sheet of lightning ripped the sky. In its split-second eerie brilliance she saw a girl, running, with her shoulders hunched and one arm crooked over her bent head in an attempt to shield herself from the storm. The flash froze her into immobility and left the image burning behind Elizabeth’s eyes.

      The thunder crashed again. Elizabeth’s hand had flown up to her mouth, but as the darkness resettled she let it drop. She waited for her heart to stop pounding with shock.

      It wasn’t the same girl.

      It was someone else, just another girl of a similar age and build. The Bennisons had rented the old house out for the season and these were the summer tenants, that was all.

      Two or three years ago Sam Bennison had laid out fancy garden lighting along the path to the Captain’s House and now these little flares suddenly shone out, lighting up sopping-wet billows of overgrown foliage. The back door of the house stood open and two girls were trailing mournfully back to the car, their hair already draggled and soaking. The lights picked out their T-shirts and denimed legs and big white sneakers. A man gave each of them an armful of luggage from the open back of the station-wagon and they trooped back to the house.

      The younger girl was indeed in her early teens, just like Doone. She was stocky, too, with the same shoulder-length hair. Otherwise, Elizabeth now saw, there was no real resemblance.

      She turned away from the window, leaving the curtains open.

      May dumped her bag on the bed in the bedroom Ivy had not chosen. Then she sat down beside it and looked around her.

      The bedhead was made of curly wrought iron, kind of French-looking, May thought, although she had no idea what a French bed might really look like. There was a pine bureau with a framed mirror screwed to the wall above it, an armchair with a worn slipcover and a set of bare shelves. Beside the bed lay a blue and grey rag rug hiding, as she saw when she pushed it aside with her foot, a burn mark in the haircord carpeting. The walls were wood panelled and painted a greyish white that reminded her of a bird’s egg. There were sticky-tape marks on the panelling showing where someone else’s pictures had once been fixed.

      Except for the faintly exotic bed, the room looked what it was – a bare shell in a beach house, stripped ready for a summer’s rental. A smell of dust and salt was trapped inside the closed windows.

      But there was also a forlornness about it, which went beyond mere emptiness. It made May shiver. Or maybe she was cold because her hair and T-shirt were wet from the rainstorm. She hugged herself and tried with numb fingers to rub some warmth into her arms.

      Ivy pushed open May’s door with the toe of her sneaker. She came in without waiting to be asked and leant against the door frame. ‘You going to sit there all night?’

      May shrugged.

      Her sister sighed and her pretty top lip lifted. Once, at school, May had heard an older girl describing Ivy. ‘She’s drop-dead gorgeous, of course,’ the girl had whispered in what had seemed a knowing, adult way. Ivy was just eighteen and May fourteen. She supposed that Ivy was gorgeous, if you went for that sort of thing. She also knew that she herself was anything but.

      Ivy said in her condescending way, ‘Look. We’re here, aren’t we? Can’t you try and be half-way happy about it?’

      ‘Yeah, all right. I notice you’ve been Miss Sunshine since we left home.’ And without waiting for Ivy to answer she got up and went to the window. After a small struggle she pushed up the sash and leant her elbows on the sill. Needle points of rain drove into her face, but the storm was already passing. Patches of faintly paler sky showed in places through the ragged masses of cloud.

      ‘Dad’s sending out for pizza,’ Ivy said to her sister’s back.

      ‘I don’t want any.’

      ‘Why not? Are you on another of your diets?’

      ‘Is that any of your business?’

      ‘Jesus. Suit yourself,’ Ivy snapped. She went away, slamming the door.

      Left alone again, May moved slowly around the room. Lightly, with the tips of her fingers, she touched the exuberant metal curves of the bedhead, and the empty bookshelf, and the faintly splintery grooves of the panelling next to the bed, then circled with her forefinger and thumb the worn knob of one of the bureau drawers. There was a distant, fluctuating, deep-throated sound, which she only now identified as waves breaking on the beach.

      The sad room seemed to enclose her, embedding her within itself in a way that was almost comforting. She sank down again on the bed. Sitting motionless, with her arms hanging between her parted knees, she let her mind wander.

      ‘May? Can you hear me?’

      She became aware that her father had been calling from downstairs for some time. She stood up reluctantly and went to the door. Yeah?’

      ‘What’s the matter with you? Will you get down here?’

      ‘Yeah. Right, I’m just coming.’

      Ivy dropped a fistful of cutlery on to the table. In the low, L-shaped downstairs room were chairs and two battered chesterfields, and a television set at one end of the long arm, and the heavy old oak table with a collection of unmatched dining chairs at the other. Even with all the lights on, the corners of the room remained obstinately shadowed. There was a yawning hearth with a stacked log basket beside it and the stone chimneypiece was blackened with smoke. The room still smelt of the driftwood smoke, as if the walls and beams were ingrained with it. In the wall facing the sea was a set of new-looking french doors, flanked by the original small-paned windows.

      The unmodernised kitchen was in the short section of the L. John opened and banged shut cupboard doors as he searched for plates and glasses. Two pizza boxes stood unopened on one of the worktops. ‘There must be some goddamn glasses somewhere.’

      The steep stairs rose straight up from the back of the room. Surprisingly the banister rails were carved with leaves and flowers.

      May drifted down and hesitated beside the table. ‘How old is this place?’ she asked, looking around.

      ‘Pretty old,’ John answered, pleased by her question. ‘The original house was built sometime in the eighteen-fifties, by the captain of a whaling ship. Which is why it’s called the Captain’s House. Probably it was just this room and the bedroom above. The rest was added later.’

      Under her breath Ivy made a small, dismissive sound, ‘Tchuh,’ to show she couldn’t care less about the house or its history, or about being here at all.

      John found the glasses in the last cupboard. ‘Let’s eat, shall we?’ he said patiently.

      They sat at the oak table, wide spaces between them. Ivy opened her pizza box and began to eat the doughy triangles straight out of it, ignoring the plate she had laid. A thread of cheese looped out of her mouth and she caught it with a silver-varnished little fingernail and pushed it between her pursed-up lips. Ivy could make even such an inelegant manoeuvre look cute and sexy.

      May felt hungry enough to have wolfed down Ivy’s entire pizza and her father’s as well. But the waistband of her jeans bit into the solid slab of her belly and the stiff fabric dug into the creases of her thighs. She ate fruit and some plain crackers from the box of supplies they had brought up from the city. She cut the pieces