Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [125]
But soon, she knows, the beach will be deserted. There is only a week remaining until the end of the season, when most of the summerfolk will leave Fortune’s Rocks. She finds that she is looking forward intensely to the fall, when the beach will be silent but for the gulls and the sea, and the cottages will be boarded up. The days will grow colder, and inland the leaves on the trees will change their color. She will get in a good supply of tinned fruit and vegetables and dried cod, and coal as well for the stoves. It might be necessary to move downstairs for the winter, she thinks; indeed, she almost certainly will have to do that. She imagines herself alone in the front room, looking through the long floor-to-ceiling windows on a cold November day, gazing down the expanse of beach, thinking of each of the other cottages shuttered and waiting for its owner once again to return to bring it back to life; and that image causes such a sudden and unexpected pang of something like grief that she stops in her progress. It is, surprisingly, she recognizes at once, grief for her father; for she sees, more clearly than she ever has (and perhaps she has not, until now, been able to allow herself to see this before), how crushed her father must have been to have his daughter, his only child, fall so far from grace, to have all his hopes dashed beyond reclamation. Was Olympia not his experiment, his pride? She remembers the night of the dinner party with Haskell and Philbrick in attendance, and the manner in which her father spoke of his daughter’s superior learning. And it was true then, she thinks; she did have a singular education. But for what purpose?
Olympia crouches on the sand and wraps her arms around her legs, resting her forehead on her knees. Her hat slips backward off her head. She thinks of all the hours her father spent instructing her, all the days of lessons and debate. What will he be doing with those hours now?
“You all right, miss?” she hears a voice beside her ask.
She looks up quickly into the face of a boy. He is frowning and seems slightly puzzled by her odd posture. She sits back on the sand and props herself up with her hands.
“Yes,” she says, reassuring him. “I am fine now.”
He stands politely, in his dry navy bathing costume, his hands folded neatly behind his back, a position that incongruously suggests the military. The boy has yellow curls and a splash of freckles below his eyes, which are a blue so pale as to resemble water in a glass.
“You are sad,” he says.
“A bit.”
“Because of the jellyfish?”
She smiles. “No, not exactly.”
“What is your name?”
“Olympia.”
“Oh.”
“What is yours?”
“Edward. I am nine.”
She offers her hand, which he takes, as a boy trying to be a man will do.
“Are you on holiday?” the boy asks.
“No, I live here.”
“Oh, you are lucky.”
Olympia sits up and wraps her arms around her knees. “But I have not lived through a winter yet. They say the winters are difficult.”
“I live in Boston,” the boy volunteers, sitting down beside her. “May I?”
“Yes, of course,” she says, smiling at his attention to manners. “You are here with your brothers and sisters?”
“One sister, but she is only a baby,” he says, implying that a baby is of not much use.
Olympia glances around her and sees no concerned adult. “Will your mother and father not worry where you are?”
“I shouldn’t think so, miss. They are in France now. I am here with my governess.”
“And will she not worry about where you have got to?”
“When I left her, she was sleeping on the porch.