In the living room the windows had been left open, and moths were blundering around the lamps. Ellen exclaimed in irritation, pulling the blinds down over the windows and flapping a magazine at the insects. Laura had quite forgotten about Tom’s brother, and when they heard a taxi drawing up, for a moment she thought it could be Edward after all, and she went out to the door with Tom. There was a tangle of roses by the door, and as she brushed past them their scent seemed almost wet, it was so refreshing in the night air.
‘God, this is a nice spot, Tom – just like the old days.’ Kit was at first glance rather like Tom, the same fairish, freckly colouring. But there was grace in his manner as he threw the butt of the cigarette he was smoking onto the gravel and advanced into the house with what was almost a dancer’s posture, his feet turned out.
Once in the living room and furnished with a cold beer and another cigarette, Kit was the centre of attention, as Ellen and Tom began to quiz him about his health and his plans after demobilisation. His wrist, he said, was completely recovered. It was his left hand anyway, and as good as new now. As he talked in a rather diffident way about how he was thinking of going into journalism, Laura realised that the attention bothered him. She sympathised with his obvious shyness and wondered what he had been living through; it was much harder to imagine him in active service than it was to imagine Tom there – particularly dressed as he was tonight, in a pale lavender shirt and cream pants. Now he was talking about a friend of his who was also eager for demobilisation, a man called Joe, who had been a newspaper man until he had enlisted, who was planning to go back into it, probably in Washington; it sounded like a good life – Kit was thinking of something like that.
Laura found her mind travelling back to the Joe she had known, with his anecdotes about reporting and travelling, and without thinking she said, ‘I met a journalist called Joe,’ and although Ellen obviously thought she was interrupting the conversation, Kit turned to her and they started discussing the journalists they knew until they realised it was the same man, one Joe Segal, and that the strange vagaries of fate had led them to know him at different times, on different boats, six years apart from one another. Laura thought little of it in the moment, simply smiling and nodding, exclaiming about the coincidence.
But as she gained her room that night, she realised how the discovery had destabilised her. Joe, smiling at her in the smoky bar, his hand warm on her leg on the dark deck. There was no escape from memories; the memories of her childhood that Mother and Ellen brought with them, and now the memory of those days when she thought she was escaping. She felt the web of the past restricting her, pulling her back when she thought she could move forwards.
She woke blearily to breakfast the next day, and found that the influx of new people into the house had energised Tom. He was insisting that they should all go sailing, and had borrowed a boat from a neighbour he had known from childhood. Ellen demurred, saying that she had to stay back with Janet, and Mother said that she didn’t see how, with her knees, she could clamber in and out of a boat. Part of Laura also longed to stay back in the shade of the garden; the air would be damp and cool under the old elm tree. But that was where Mother would be lying all day in a deckchair. It was better to get out, then, onto the sea.
When she went down to the beach, Tom and Kit were reminiscing about making exactly this same trip in the past; they were talking about their parents, about old neighbours, about the time when their boat had sunk and they had been stranded in a distant bay for a whole day and half a night. She felt out of step with them; she was just a passenger, and while they were soon busy with ropes and sails and anchors, she was clumsy and tentative in the boat which seemed so unpredictable, and she sat gingerly on the wooden benches.
The short trip in the small boat felt exposed, out on the naked water under the cloudless sky, but when they got round to the cove that Tom was aiming for, Laura could see its charm; it was enclosed, hard to scramble down to from the road. There was just one other family there already, an image of what Tom and Kit’s must have been years ago: a silver-haired father with tall adolescent boys. Laura stumbled getting out of the boat – the rocks were slippery under her sandshoes – and Kit reached out a hand to help her, but his fingers seemed inert on hers.