“After his death. How strange. Samuel said nothing about it.”
“Samuel might not have known. It was a mortgage, after all. Not part of the shipping business.”
“Still.”
I shrug my shoulders and follow Evelyn into her bedroom, which is much smaller than ours. Just a single bed, a wardrobe, a chair, a white enamel sink in the corner. Designed for maids and children. Evelyn looks up and shows me the paper, on which she’s drawn a picture of some kind of person. A woman in a sharp triangle dress with long arms and stubby legs.
“Oh, that’s lovely, darling. Who is it?”
Evelyn totters to her feet and points to the doorway. “Auntie Clara!”
“Do you know,” says Clara, standing in the doorway, “when I’m feeling rather low, I find an outing to the beach cheers me up straightaway. What do you say to that?”
For many years after we first moved to New York, an uncanny sensation dogged the pattern of my daily life: the certainty that someone was watching me.
I felt it continuously, in those early months. That first brutal winter in our grubby, alien basement apartment that reeked of beer and wet earth and vomit, when Father slept on the creaking Victorian sofa in the front room and Sophie and I huddled together in a tiny cot in what I guess was the back room, though it was really more like a cupboard. A cold, damp cupboard. And yet it was a relief to descend those dark steps and duck into our cave—a small relief, anyway—because at least here, unlike the streets and buildings of Manhattan, a billion eyes didn’t follow your every movement. At least here you didn’t have to resist the physical urge to look over your shoulder every two seconds, to scour the surface of every reflective shop window; at least here, in our tiny apartment, you knew that the crawling sensation of somebody’s eyes on your skin, penetrating your secrets, was only an illusion.
As the weeks trudged on, however, the feeling began to fade. In the anonymity of city life, the months upon years in which our obscurity remained undisturbed, I came to escape—first for an hour or two, then for an entire day—the immediate, visceral awareness of being observed, of being stalked and hunted, a consciousness in which every window was a menace and every patch of open space a danger.
But I have never lost it entirely. The sensation still returns from time to time, like an unwelcome relative: sometimes in faint, gradual steps and sometimes suddenly, with such debilitating force that my reason scatters, my logic crumbles, leaving me alive on instinct alone.
And I am nothing more than a rabbit, caught in the open.
I mention this not because the hunted feeling strikes me anew, as Clara directs the casino attendant in the proper fixing of a pair of striped beach umbrellas, but because a man really is watching us. From a round table at the edge of the boardwalk, all by himself, nursing a tall glass of something-or-other and a grim, clean-shaved expression. Rather handsome, in a thick-boned way, if you imagined away the scar on his chin and the ruggedness of his nose. He’s wearing a worn straw boater, adorned above the brim with a thin strip of grosgrain, a plain navy blue.
I don’t think Clara notices, and I’m certainly not going to mention him. For once, I’m not troubled. Isn’t that funny? All those years of false alarm, and now a real live man observes my every gesture from a corner table, and I don’t give a flying damn. The sun is fierce, the ocean beats on the nearby sand. The salt breeze rushes against my face, electric with life. I hold Evelyn’s hand and wade into the foam, and a wave hurtles through the skirt of my old serge bathing costume, washes between my legs, cool and tempestuous, swirling and sucking as I hoist Evelyn free of the undertow. If a man wants to watch us play in the sea, then let him. The murder trial’s over. All our secrets are out. Nothing left to fear, is there?
Clara wades by, wearing a different bathing costume altogether, modern and daring. No thick black stockings for her; oh no. She looks like a child, lean and narrow-hipped, navy suit clinging to her skin. At least six inches of fair, bare English thigh separate the edge of the skirt from the top of her knee, and yet she thrashes her arms and legs, she laughs and skips as if she doesn’t think anyone’s watching. As if she’s not trying to excite any male attention whatsoever by this lascivious display, as if she just wants to be free. She takes Evelyn’s other hand, and together we swing my daughter up into another wave, giggling and gasping, while the sun burns our skin and the ocean washes us clean, and the sand scrubs our feet all smooth. As smooth and pure as a newborn’s tummy.
But you can’t endure such pleasure for long, and the sun really does burn your skin. A quarter of an hour later we take shelter under the umbrellas, and Evelyn starts to work with a bucket and spade while Clara fetches drinks to cool us down. “Lemon ice!” she announces, handing me a paper cup. “Isn’t it divine? You Americans are so terribly clever. Where do you get all this lovely ice?”
“The iceman, of course.”
“Cheeky.” She plops into the canvas chair beside me and stretches her legs into the sand. “I say. What heaven. Imagine Simon having his own house, right on the beach like that. I wonder what he used it for. I don’t believe he had any particular passion for the sea, when we were young. Do you?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t there.”
She kicks me with her toe. “Aren’t you the smart one! You know what I mean.”
“No. He never spoke about the sea.”
“You see? And you can’t get much better beach than this. But why?”
“I suppose he had his reasons.”
Clara sucks on her ice. “What are you going to do with it, then? The house on the beach, I mean. Or what’s left of it.”
“I haven’t decided.”
“But what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see.”
Clara leans forward to the edge of the shade, where Evelyn is dumping her pail of sand over her toes. “Evelyn, my darling. Do you absolutely love the beach?”
“Yes!”
“Would you like to live on the beach?”
Evelyn turns to me. “Can we, Mama? Can we?”
“Oh, darling—”
“Please, Mama!” She flings herself on my knees. “Please beach!”
I stroke her head and stare down at her limpet eyes, and I say to Clara, “Thanks very much.”
“Anytime.”