Skipper

The fourth piece of green went into the jar at eight o’clock, and Camille was standing on the grass to hear it land.

She had not meant to be there. She had meant to be at her oven, as she had been for the first three. But at a quarter to eight Arlo had taken the tray out of her hands on the kitchen porch.

“Go,” he said. “Doreen’s got the questions and Josie’s got the bags. I can carry a tray, Chef. I’ve watched it done.”

“The second kouign-amann come out at ten past.”

“And I turn them out of the rings while they’re hot and I don’t lick my fingers. Go on. He’s got the boat in the water.”

So she had come down the lawn in her whites with a side towel still over her shoulder, and her mother had looked up from the folding stool without any surprise at all.

Biscuit was in the lake. She floated beside the dock at the second pair of posts, tied to one of them at the bow and to the next at the stern, so close in that she could not have swung a foot either way. Her mast was bare. Last Saturday Tilly had sat in her for forty minutes on the lawn, on the two fenders, and steered across a great deal of grass. That had been a boat on land. This one moved when the water moved.

Gideon stood on the shore in a black wetsuit with his navy life jacket over it. Camille looked at the wetsuit once and then looked at the jar.

“That’s four,” Tilly said, screwing the lid down. Then she pointed at the thermometer lying on the grass on its string. “What is it today?”

“Fifty.”

“You said sixty. You said it was your rule.”

“I said nobody sails until sixty, and nobody’s sailing. She’s tied at both ends and she has no sail on. I’m going to be in the water so that you don’t have to be.” He nodded at the dock. “The second post is before your sixth board. You wouldn’t have to go one plank further than you already go.”

Tilly looked at the boat for a long moment. She gave the jar to her grandmother to hold, which she had never done before, and walked onto the dock.

Camille followed as far as the first plank and made herself stop there. Gideon waded in from the beach. She saw the cold take him at the knees and again at the waist. His face did not change. He came round the stern and laid both hands on the gunwale on the lake side. The water was at the buckle of his life jacket.

Tilly stopped level with the boat. The gunwale was about a foot below the planks and a hand’s width out from them.

He looked up at her. “You’re the skipper,” he said. “You say when.”

He said nothing after that.

Camille looked at her watch, because she did not know what else to do with her eyes. It was four minutes past eight.

For the first minute Tilly did not move. She stood with her red boots together and looked down at the strip of water between the dock and the hull. Camille knew what she was seeing. She had seen it herself every night for a month last autumn, that dark green water closing over a small head.

Every part of her wanted to speak. She wanted to say, “You don’t have to, my heart,” and “We can try next week,” and “Come here.” She had said things like them for five years. She had been the only voice at every doorway her daughter had ever stood in. She pressed her tongue against the back of her teeth and kept it there.

In the second minute Tilly knelt down and examined the bow line. She followed it with one finger from the cleat to the post. She took hold of the knot and pulled, hard.

“Hawk knot,” she said, to nobody.

She went and tested the stern line the same way. She lay down on her stomach, as she had found him lying a month ago, and looked under the dock at the posts. She got up. She looked at his hands on the gunwale. They were bare, and the knuckles had gone white, and at the fifth minute Camille saw a shiver run across his shoulders and saw him stop it.

He did not shift his feet. He did not say “Take your time,” which would have meant “Hurry up.” He did not smile at her to encourage her. He watched the boat and held it still, like a man holding a ladder.

At seven minutes Tilly sat down on the edge of the dock with her boots hanging over the hull. At nine she put one boot on the bottom of the boat. Biscuit dipped an inch. Tilly’s whole body went stiff, and Camille’s nails went into her own palms.

The boat stopped moving at once. He had not said a word. He had only leaned on the far side, and the hull had come level as if it were set in concrete.

Tilly looked at her boot. She looked at him. Then she put the other boot beside it, let go of the dock and stepped down. She sat, turned herself to face the bow, and took the tiller in her right hand, exactly as she had been shown on the grass.

“Eleven minutes,” Lucille said quietly from the stool. “I’ve waited longer at a railway crossing.”

Camille could not answer her. Her throat had closed.

Out on the water her daughter sat very straight in the yellow jacket, with fifty-degree lake all round her and a quarter inch of fibreglass under her. She pushed the tiller away and pulled it back. She looked over the side, deliberately, at the water. Then she raised her chin.

“This boat is mine on Saturdays,” she announced.

“She’s yours on Saturdays,” Gideon said. It was the first thing he had said in eleven minutes, and his voice was rough with cold.

“On the other days she can be the inn’s.”

“That seems fair.”

“You can let go a little bit. One hand.”

He took one hand off. Biscuit rocked on a ripple, and Tilly rode it with her mouth pressed tight, and then, slowly, the corners of the mouth went up.

Camille turned round and faced the inn. She wiped her eyes with the side towel and told herself it was the wind. She had got her daughter back onto the dock by herself, six boards of it, in eight months of evenings. She was proud of every plank. A man in a wetsuit had just got that child into a boat in eleven minutes, by saying eight words and then having the sense to stop.

She was glad of it, and she was glad without any reservation. Underneath the gladness there was something small and mean that she did not like finding in herself, and she made herself give it its name. It was jealousy.

Tilly stayed in the boat for twenty-five minutes. When she climbed out she did it alone, and she checked both knots again before she left.

He came up the beach with the water running off him. His lips were grey. Lucille, without a word, unscrewed her thermos and handed him the cup, and he took it in both hands.

“Thank you, Mrs. Bouchard.”

“You’ll catch your death,” Lucille said. From her that was practically an embrace.

Tilly collected her jar. She studied him while he drank.

“Staff lunch is at half past eleven,” she said. “You can come. You have to change first, because you’re dripping.”

He looked over her head at Camille. He was asking, plainly, and he would have said no if she had shaken her head. Lunch was not on the order pad. Nothing on the pad forbade it either.

“There’s soup,” Camille said. “You look as though you could use it.”
***
The staff ate at the kitchen end of the dining room, at two tables pushed together, before the guests came in at noon. On a Saturday there were twelve of them. Camille brought the pot through herself, leek and potato, and set it down at Winnie’s elbow.

He was already there. He had on dry jeans and the grey sweater, and his hair was still damp. He stood behind a chair near the foot of the table, and he looked like a man who had been told to wait for the head waiter.

He had not eaten at this table since he came back. The staff had talked about that, and they had talked about him. They had watched him go up a ladder and down a cellar and sit at a bakery window making change. They were still talking, and Camille had stopped trying to guess what they said.

“Not there,” Tilly told him. “That’s Emmett’s. You’re here.”

She patted the chair beside her own. Hers had a cushion on it and stood at Camille’s right hand, where it had stood since she was old enough to sit up. On Tilly’s other side there was usually Arlo. Arlo, coming in with the bread, saw how things lay and took the chair across the table without a word.

Gideon sat down. Emmett Delisle, the gardener, who was sixty-eight and had taught a boy called Jamie to splice rope, gave him a slow nod from the foot of the table. Doreen, from housekeeping, looked hard at the back of his head, as if she were thinking that it wanted cutting again.

Winnie ladled soup. Bowls went down the table hand to hand.

“I was in the boat,” Tilly informed the company. “In the water. It took eleven minutes, Mémé timed it. It’s my boat on Saturdays.”

“I saw you from the window,” Josie said. “You looked like a captain.”

“A skipper. A captain is for big boats.”

“Well done, Matilda,” said Emmett. “That’s a thing to have done before lunch.”

Tilly accepted this. She picked up her spoon, and put it down again, and looked sideways and up at the man next to her. He was near enough for her to see his face properly, and the west windows were full of light.

“Gideon’s eye is broke the same as mine,” she said, clearly, to the whole table. “Look. It’s the left one. It’s got the same piece in it.”

Nobody spoke.

Camille had her hand on the bread knife and it stayed there. Twelve people had turned their heads because a child had said “look.” They saw a man of thirty-three and a girl of five side by side in the window light, with their faces turned the same way. They saw the same clear grey twice over, with the same brown wedge low in each left eye.

Arlo looked at his soup. Josie’s mouth opened a little and shut. Doreen’s eyes went to Camille and away again, quickly and kindly. Emmett Delisle went on buttering a roll as though it needed all his attention. They had all known her through a pregnancy and a walk every day to a mailbox. They could add up, every one of them. She saw them do it, and she saw every one of them decide to keep quiet.

Gideon had not moved. He was looking at his bowl. He did not look at her for help, and she knew what that cost him.

“It isn’t really broke,” Tilly went on, a little impatient with the silence. “I only say that. It’s a wedge. He got his from his father.”

“Is that so,” said Winnie, in her flat Yankee voice. She picked up the basket and held it out across the table. “Bread, Mr. Hallett. It’s the heel end you’ve got there. Don’t let her talk you out of it.”

“The heel is mine,” Tilly said at once.

“Then you’d better ask him nicely.”

He put the heel on the edge of her plate. His hand was not quite steady. Tilly said thank you, and Arlo asked Josie very loudly what the window had taken, and Josie said two thousand and forty, and the table started to breathe again.

Camille cut the rest of the loaf. Under the cloth, where nobody could see, Winnie’s hand found her knee and gave it one hard pat.
***
The numbers that night were good. Winnie had nineteen of the twenty-two rooms taken for the holiday weekend, and eleven names on a list for the other three. Camille sat on her side of the rolltop and Gideon sat on his, and they took fifteen percent off the wedding line and it still stood. He did not look at her mouth. She noticed that he did not, and she was irritated to find that she minded.

“She invited me,” he said at the end, when Winnie had gone for her coat. “I didn’t angle for it.”

“I know. I was standing there.”

“What she said at the table. I didn’t know what you’d want me to do.”

“You did nothing. It was right.” She closed the binder. “They won’t say anything. They’ve known how to keep quiet about me since before she was born.”

It was after eleven when she reached the cottage. Her mother was asleep on the pull-out with the television off. Tilly was on her back with her arms above her head. The jar stood on the windowsill among the others, with four greens in the bottom of it.

Camille made tea she did not want. She carried it to the back door, opened it and leaned on the frame.

The night was mild, the first mild one of the year. There were peepers going in the wet ground by the cedars. The lawn fell away in front of her, silver-grey, two hundred yards to the black shape of the boathouse. There was a light in the window that faced up the hill.

She stood and looked at it.

For five years she had been enough. That was the whole of what she had set out to be, on the day the third envelope came back. She had decided that one person could be enough for a child if she was careful and never tired and never wrong. She had been tired and she had been wrong, plenty of times, but she had been enough. Tilly had a stool and a saucer and sixty yards of flagstones, and until a month ago she had never seemed to be missing anything.

Tilly had taken eleven minutes today and picked a seat for him at lunch. She would pick again next week. Camille could see already what it would be like to be one of two. She found she did not hate it. She had expected to, and it would have been easier.

That was the half of it that concerned her daughter. The other half concerned nobody but herself, and it was down the lawn with the lamp on.

She knew what the room looked like. She knew the fourth tread from the top and the sound the springs made. She knew how his mouth felt now as well as then, because she had found out on a breakwater nine days ago and had thought about it every day since. If she walked down the lawn he would open the door. He would ask her if she was sure. She thought he would ask her twice.

She wanted to go, and she did not dress the wanting up as curiosity or loneliness. She wanted him, this one, the tired man with the scar through his eyebrow who had stood in the lake with his hands going white.

In six weeks eight people from New York would sit in her dining room and vote on whether she had a job and a house. She could think about that quite calmly. She had numbers for it, and a plan. She had no numbers for the light in the window. She had a rule about men who left, and the rule did not say what to do about one who had come back and kept coming, four Saturdays out of four.

The tea went cold in her hand. A moth came in past her shoulder and she let it.

She did not go down. She stood there until the window over the boathouse went dark, a little after midnight. Then she shut the door and locked it, and stood for a moment longer with her hand flat on the wood.
***