Just give in to her, Sunny, Bertie thought. You never win. Ever. She carried on digging serenely, one hand manoeuvring her short-handled little spade, the other holding the sandwich, which she had no intention of eating. After she’d dug placidly for a while she shifted her bottom along and started another hole as if she had a plan in mind, although the plan didn’t go beyond digging as many holes as possible before the day was done.
Bertie had been christened “Moon”—not christened, “named,” in a “naming ceremony,” a ritual devised by Dorothy and held at night in the woods behind the house with the whole commune present. Viola handed her newborn peacefully sleeping baby to Dorothy, who raised her up to the moon as if Bertie was an offering, and for one surprising moment Viola had wondered if her daughter was going to be sacrificed. Bertie held “the privilege” of being the first baby born in the commune, Dorothy said. “We give you the future,” she said, addressing the moon, who remained non-committal about the gift. It began to rain and Bertie woke up and started to cry.
“Now we must feast!” Dorothy declared as they headed indoors. Not on the baby, but on its placenta, fried by Jeanette with onions and parsley. Viola declined her portion—it seemed like cannibalism, not to mention utterly disgusting.
And, yes, Sun and Moon, those really were their names.
Luckily, Bertie had been given her grandmother’s name as well. “Moon Roberta?” Teddy said, trying to keep his voice expressionless on the telephone when informed of this. “That’s unusual.”
“Well, you don’t want to be called the same thing as everyone else, do you?” Viola said. “There are enough Sophies and Sarahs in the world. You want something that makes you stand out as different.” Teddy tended to believe the opposite, but kept his counsel. It didn’t last long. Sun soon became Sunny and Bertie avoided being Moony by refusing to answer to any lunar version of her name until most people forgot it was on her birth certificate, her birth registered very reluctantly by Dominic who thought it was demanded by a “totalitarian bureaucracy,” which was the same reason he and Viola weren’t married.
The only person whom Bertie permitted to remember her parents’ lunacy was her grandfather, who sometimes called her Bertie Moon, which Bertie found oddly comforting.
She finished another hole, if a hole can ever be said to be finished, and dropped the sandwich in it.
Viola gave Sunny the rucksack and said, “There’s a satsuma in there. Somewhere.” Her son snarled at the idea of a satsuma.
“Oh, stop bellyaching, will you?” Viola murmured, too intent on the sea to be properly irritated with him.
(“Why did you have children?” Bertie asked, later in their lives. “Was it just the biological imperative to breed?”
“That’s why everyone has children,” Viola said. “They just dress it up as something more sentimental.”)
Viola wished she had binoculars. The sun glinting off the water made it hard to make out anything clearly. There were a lot of people in the sea and from this distance they all looked pretty much indistinguishable, just shapes bobbing around in the blue like lazy seals. She had terrible short sight but was too vain to wear her spectacles.
Sunny retreated temporarily from the battle and returned to collecting pebbles. He loved pebbles. Rocks, stones, gravel, but sea-smoothed pebbles were best. He couldn’t believe what a rich source this beach was. He probably wouldn’t even be able to collect all of them.
“Where’s Daddy?” Bertie asked, looking up suddenly from her digging.
“Swimming.”
“Where?”
“In the sea, of course.”
Near to where she was sitting Viola noticed a driftwood stick, bone-white and brittle, poking up like a skeletal fingerpost from the sand. She took it and idly started to sketch symbols in the dry sand—pentagrams and horned moons and the maligned swastika. She had recently taken up the study of magic. Or “Magick.”
“What do you mean—like sawing a woman in half?” a bewildered Teddy asked.
“Ritual Magick. There’s a ‘k’ on the end. Witchcraft, the occult, paganism. The Tarot. It’s not tricks, it’s deep earth stuff.”
“Spells?”
“Sometimes.” Said with a modest shrug.
She had read the Tarot last night with Jeanette. The Sun, the Moon, the Fool, one after the other—her family. The High Priestess—Dorothy obviously. The Tower—a disaster, a new beginning? The Star—another baby? God forbid, although Star was a nice name. How long had Dominic been gone? He was a good swimmer but not so good that he could stay out there this long.