still prevailed.
In that year, the holiday came on a Monday. Bernard walked the water line looking for mussels to inspect. Siobhan did her faultless
fouettés en tournant
on firm sand below the tide line. Paul Kozinski was strangely compliant that morning. He claimed he had to fly to Melbourne later, so the day would be foreshortened. But he smiled. He was not abstracted.
Just the same, he brought with him not so much the musk of other women. It was the musk of another preoccupation, the way he played politely at being the husband and the father.
—Two years ago we would have had a barbecue, and thirty or forty people would have come out here.
—It’s nicer
en famille
.
They had moved into this phase of guarded pleasantries. It was a brittle state, thinner than a filament.
Sometimes at this time of year the Pacific grew still and earned its name. That day it was the sort of sea in which you could imagine yourself swimming all the way from Palm Beach south along the ramparts of sandstone cliff to the next beach south, which was named Whale. That afternoon she even thought in a random way of getting Denise to stay with the children on the shore, and of heading out on a surf-ski to paddle miles down the coast. A modest adventure was open to a mother on such a day,with the slightest utterance of a southerly breeze still two hundred miles away. If she only had Paul to pick her up at, say, Newport.
But she understood that she had no one but Denise to call on. She would be humiliated to ask her father or Uncle Frank, and even though—if he hadn’t been going to Melbourne—Paul might in fact willingly do it, she did not want, aglow with the energy of her rowing, to encounter the mute Perdita-dazzlement in his eyes as he asked for the sake of form, How was it?
Thus, after Paul left to pack and go to Melbourne, she went exploring ledges of rock left bare only once or twice a year by rare, low, tranquil seas like this one. Siobhan and Bernard were such consummate beach folk now. They knew to the nearest square meter of stone what rocks generally lay below the sea. They got a thrill from walking on surfaces usually deep beneath a growing surf. If you wanted shells not normally encountered, and strange sea animals left behind in isolated pockets of lenslike water, then both were available to you when the Pacific was low and imitated its tranquil name.
On a great sandstone boulder above where Siobhan and Bernard and she were fossicking she saw a man holding binoculars. His head and shoulders were completely covered with a large beach towel. Under the beach towel he wore the sort of floppy white hat favored by aesthetes or pedophiles in British films about the Mediterranean in the Edwardian era. He was wearing long white trousers too; either careful of the sun even as late as now, when it was on its way back north, or else wanting to show he didn’t intend to take part in water sports. He was in fact taken up entirely with what he could see through the binoculars. Kate idly followed the line his lenses were aimed along and saw a little way out what looked like porpoises or oily flaps of seaweed. The shapes, however, then defined themselves as two divers in wet suits, lying with their backs and their calves breaking the surface, their airtanks discernible but their heads under, fixed on the subaqueous planet. They moved barely but both at once, browsing.
They must have wanted simultaneously to see more closely what was there, because in unison they kicked up two sets of flippers in the air, and went—communally fascinated—for the bottom. Now they were utterly out of sight.
The man dropped his binoculars for a second, though his eyes kept to the point the two had disappeared from. It was Murray,the seeker of signatures for petitions. And now—it seemed from all of the protective clothing he wore—the sun hater.
She drew level with him and called out hello.
—Kate Kozinski. I’m sorry you didn’t stop the
London Casey, Ana W. Fawkes