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“Not really,” Michael said defensively. But then he relented. “I don’t know. Maybe. She’s tough, my mother, and Roxie isn’t tough, and I think fundamentally Mum just couldn’t understand why Roxie did what she did.”
“What about you?” Summer asked.
“What about me?”
“Do you understand it?”
“No. I’ve tried to. But I don’t. I understand loving someone, but not losing yourself to that degree. It’s not healthy.”
No, thought Summer, it’s not. But it’s human.
She wondered if Michael De Vere had ever been in love.
But that was one question she was too afraid to ask.
Chapter Nineteen
Alexia De Vere closed her eyes and tried to enjoy the feeling of the salt breeze in her hair and the warm sand between her toes. For years, her entire twenties, she had avoided beaches. It was the sounds that bothered her most: the rhythmic lapping of the waves, the distant peal of children’s laughter. Just thinking about those sounds made her feel sick and anxious. But since Teddy had persuaded her to buy the Gables in the early nineties, she’d slowly rediscovered her love of the ocean. The irony was that Teddy, probably the most English man in the world, had chosen to buy in the States. But Arnie Meyer had offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse, and over the years both he and Alexia had come to love Martha’s Vineyard.
These days, Alexia found the vastness of the ocean calming rather than frightening. She enjoyed the sense of nature being so big, and her own life and struggles so small by comparison. All her life, Alexia De Vere had struggled to be someone, someone important, someone whose life mattered. A little boy had lost his life because of her, and a decent man had had his life destroyed. She owed it to both of them to make her own life count, to achieve something significant. So it was ironic in a way that the feeling of insignificance the ocean gave her should bring her such profound peace.
“Spit spot, no dawdling!” Lucy Meyer’s Mary Poppins impression was embarrassingly bad, but it always made Alexia laugh. Because Lucy truly was Mary Poppins, in so many ways. “We’ll never get to the beach by lunchtime if you keep standing there with your eyes closed like Kate Winslet on the Titanic.”
It was an unfortunate allusion. Too often these days Alexia felt as if she were aboard the Titanic, sailing inexorably toward her doom. She’d worked things out with the prime minister before Parliament broke for the summer—at least she thought she had. And despite the storm of disapproval within the party over her handling of the flag-burning affair, in all the opinion polls Alexia’s popularity rating was high. Even the Daily Mail was changing its tune in support of her tough-on-immigration stance. But the turmoil in her personal life had stopped her from savoring these successes. Not being able to talk properly to Teddy about the pressure she was under was the hardest part of all. Just alluding to Billy Hamlin the other night had sent Teddy into a full-fledged panic. If she hadn’t known it before, she knew it now: she had to solve her problems on her own.
“Sorry,” she called ahead to Lucy. “Lead on.”
Lucy and Alexia had finally found time for their much-postponed hike to the Gay Head Lighthouse. Perilously close to the ever-eroding cliffs, the current redbrick structure had been built in 1844 to replace a wooden tower authorized by President John Quincy Adams, and was a popular tourist attraction on the island. With her encyclopedic knowledge of Martha’s Vineyard’s sandy tracks and back roads, however, Lucy had devised a route where no other sightseers would bother her and Alexia.
Since their tête-à-tête in Lucy’s kitchen two weeks earlier, neither woman had alluded to the “secrets” of Alexia’s past. They’d been walking for over an hour now, and still Alexia had said nothing, leaving Lucy to fill the silence with excited prattle about Michael and Summer’s burgeoning love affair.
“I’m telling you, I hear wedding bells.”
“You always hear bells.” Alexia laughed. “You’re Quasimodo.”
Alexia wanted desperately to talk about Billy Hamlin and her past. But starting the conversation was harder than she’d thought it would be. Back at Pilgrim Farm that first night, buoyed by everybody’s kindness and warm wishes, the subject had all come up naturally. Now, in the cold light of day, she would have to begin again.
How does one do that, after forty years of silence?
In the end, Lucy broke the ice for her.
“So,” she said, when they finally stopped for lunch at a clearing on top of the cliffs. “Do you still want to talk to me about Billy?”
She remembers the name. She’s been thinking about it.
“It’s fine if you don’t. I just thought I’d ask. In case it’s still bothering you.”
Lucy said it so casually, between mouthfuls of an egg and watercress sandwich. Even her choice of words was harmless. Billy Hamlin had been “bothering” Alexia. Not terrorizing. Not haunting. Bothering. Like a fly, or a hole in one’s sock.
Alexia bit her lip nervously. It was now or never.
“What would you say if I told you I’d once done something terrible? Something that I would give anything to take back, but that I can’t change.”
Lucy tried not to betray her own nerves when she answered.
“I’d say welcome to the human race. We all have regrets, Alexia. Especially at our age.”
Regrets. Bothering. Lucy made it all sound so acceptable, so normal. But then Lucy didn’t know the truth. Not yet.
