The Unloved by John Saul Read Free Book Online

Toby’s hair. “If I got you in as much trouble with your mother as you get me into with mine, you’d never speak to me again, would you?” Toby shook his head wildly, looking for all the world like a happy puppy. “Well, you got off lucky this time,” Marguerite went on. “She’s taking a nap, and she didn’t see you. So scoot along home, but next time you come, you march right up to the door and knock. If Jeff invites you, she can’t tell me to order you off the island, can she?”
    Toby looked eagerly at Jeff. “Will you?” he asked. “I mean, invite me?”
    “Okay,” Jeff agreed. “But you have to invite me to your house too.”
    The eagerness faded from Toby’s eyes and he looked uncertainly up at Marguerite. “We’ll see,” she promised him. “But as long as Jeff’s here, you come out here any time you want to.”
    A few minutes later, as Toby started threading his way back along the path across the island and toward the causeway, Marguerite led Julie and Jeff up the beach toward the old mansion. They walked in silence for a few minutes, then Julie spoke shyly.
    “Aunt Marguerite? Why won’t Grandmother let anyone use the beach? It’s so beautiful, it seems like everybody should get to use it.”
    Marguerite said nothing for a while, then put her arm around Julie’s shoulders. “It’s just the way Mother is,” she said at last. “There isn’t any reason, really. It’s just that it’s
our
beach, and Mother always worries about what’s
ours.”
She fell silent for a moment, then: “But it won’t always be that way.”
    Jeff looked up curiously. “Why not?”
    Marguerite smiled sadly. “Because she’s dying, Jeff. And when she dies, things will be different.”
    For several minutes the trio walked in silence, then Julie spoke again. “Aunt Marguerite, don’t you care if Grandmother dies? I mean, she’s your mother.”
    Marguerite stopped walking and stared up at the weathered mansion surrounded by its protective grove of oaks, then her gaze drifted out to scan the sea. Finally her eyes came to rest on Julie. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I care that Mother is going to die. I care very much.” Taking Julie by the hand, she turned and started up the slope toward the great house.
    That evening five people gathered around the huge table in the dining room of Sea Oaks. Kevin sat at the head of the table, with Anne and Marguerite to his right. Opposite their mother and aunt sat Julie and Jeff, and far down the table,empty and somehow removed from the group while still dominating it, sat the chair that Helena Devereaux would have occupied had she been well enough to come downstairs. But she had not come down. Instead, upon waking from her nap she had summoned Marguerite and told her that she would take dinner, as usual, in her room.
    Five minutes after Ruby served the soup, the angry sound of the buzzer rent the conversation. Without a word Marguerite folded her linen napkin and moved stiffly out of the dining room. The family listened to her limping up the stairs.
    A few minutes later she was back. Slipping into her chair, she resumed eating her soup as if nothing had happened.
    The buzzer sounded again as Ruby was serving the entrée, and yet again before Marguerite had finished her salad.
    When the buzzer sounded once more as Ruby was putting bowls of ice cream on the table, Marguerite again folded her napkin, but before she could leave the table, Anne spoke, smiling uncertainly at her sister-in-law. “Why don’t you eat your ice cream before it melts? Whatever it is this time, surely it can wait a few minutes?”
    Marguerite shook her head apologetically. “She hates to be kept waiting, and I don’t mind, really. I’ve been doing it so long, I don’t think I’d know what to do if I got through a meal without her calling me.” Setting her napkin down, she hurried once more out of the dining room to laboriously climb the stairs.
    Only when she was certain that Marguerite was out