Madison - No Trespassing

Chapter One: The Lens

Cutter’s Point - June

The house had fourteen rooms, and Edward Ashby lived in three of them.

He slept in the big bedroom on the upper floor that looked out over the sea. He ate standing up in the kitchen, or sitting on the porch steps with a plate on his knee. And in the mornings, before anything else, he climbed the narrow stairs at the end of the upper hall and went out through a low door onto the roof deck, with a cup of black coffee in his hand, and stood at the white railing and looked at the Atlantic.

The other eleven rooms he left alone. The library, with its four thousand books, most of them his own in thirty languages. The dining room, where nobody had eaten since his wife left. The guest rooms. The study at the end of the ground floor, where a huge old partners’ desk of dark oak stood under the window, eight feet long and as heavy as a boat, with a closed laptop on it and a stack of clean white paper beside it that had not been touched in four years.

The house stood alone on the dune at Cutter’s Point, three miles north of Wexley Harbor, at the end of a long sandy lane through the beach grass. It was a wide, white clapboard house with two storeys and sky-blue shutters, a long covered porch along the front, a balcony above it, and on top of everything the flat roof deck with its white railing. A wooden staircase ran down from the porch through the grass to the beach. At the bottom of the staircase, where the dune met the sand, a white sign on a post said PRIVATE BEACH. NO TRESPASSING. He had put it there himself, eleven years ago, the summer the first film came out and the tourists started walking up from town to look at his windows.

The beach below was his. A long curve of pale sand, half a mile from the rocks at the southern end to the rocks at the northern end, empty in both directions. At low tide you could walk along the shore all the way to town. At high tide the sea came up to the rocks at both ends and closed the beach off, and it was his alone.

That was how he liked it.

He was fifty-six years old. He had written eleven novels, and seven of them had been made into films, and two of the films had won things. He had been married for nineteen years to a woman who had been famous before he was, and divorced for four. He had more money than he would ever spend. He swam a mile in the sea every morning from May to October, rowed in the afternoons, split his own firewood all winter, and could still do a hundred push-ups without stopping, which he did every night before bed for no reason that he could explain to anyone, least of all himself.

He had not written a word since the divorce.

People asked him about it. His agent asked him every week. Journalists asked him on the rare occasions he let them near him. He told all of them the same thing: that he had written enough, that the world had plenty of his books, that he was happy to sit on his porch and watch the sea and let younger men worry about sentences. Some of them believed him. He almost believed it himself.

The Telescope

The telescope had arrived in April, in a wooden crate the size of a coffin.

It was a present to himself, the kind of present a man buys when he has nothing left that he needs. A big brass refractor, made in Germany, on a heavy wooden tripod with brass fittings, with a lens the width of a dinner plate and a mount that could carry a camera. The man in the shop in Boston had told him it was the best instrument of its kind in New England. He had said Edward would be able to see the rings of Saturn from his roof as clearly as a coin on a table.

Edward had carried it up to the roof deck himself, piece by piece, and set it up by the railing on the side that faced the sea. He had looked at the moon through it on the first clear night, and at Saturn, and the man in Boston had been right. He had stood there for an hour in the cold with his eye to the glass, looking at the rings.

He had not looked at Saturn since.

‘For the stars,’ he told Mrs Greer, when she came up to the roof on her first morning back in May to sweep the deck and found it standing there under its canvas cover.

Agnes Greer was sixty-seven, small and square and grey, with short hair and strong forearms and a face that had stopped being surprised by anything around the time of the Second World War. She came three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, from eight until noon, and had done so for eleven years. She cleaned, she did his laundry, she left a pie in the refrigerator on Fridays, and she said almost nothing. She was the only person in Wexley Harbor who had ever been inside his bedroom.

She looked at the telescope for a long moment. Then she looked at him.

‘Stars,’ she said.

‘Stars.’

She nodded, slowly, and went back down the stairs with her broom, and he did not hear another word from her about it until June.

The First Morning

It was the eleventh of June, a Tuesday, and he had been up since five.

He did not sleep well. He had not slept well for years. He would wake in the dark with his heart beating and no reason for it, and lie there until the window turned grey, and then give up and go downstairs and make coffee. That morning he took his cup up to the roof at a quarter to seven, as he always did, and stood at the railing in a grey sweater and old canvas trousers, with his bare feet on the cool boards, and looked at the sea.

The tide was out. The beach below him was wide and flat and shining, the wet sand at the edge of the water like a mirror. A gull walked along the line of the waves. There was nobody else.

Then there was.

She came from the south, from the direction of town, running along the hard wet sand at the water’s edge. At first she was just a small figure moving fast against the glare. Then she was closer, and he saw that she was tall, and that she was running the way athletes run, long and loose and easy, and that her hair was dark and tied up high on her head and swinging behind her, and that she was wearing almost nothing at all.

A red bikini. That was the first thing he saw clearly. A red so bright against the grey and silver of the morning that it looked like a mistake.

She ran past the rocks at the southern end of his beach and onto his sand and kept going until she was more or less level with his house. Then she stopped, and put her hands on her hips, and stood breathing hard and looking at the sea.

Edward put his coffee cup down on the railing.

He would think about that afterwards, many times. He would think that he could have picked the cup up again and gone downstairs. That he could have walked down the wooden staircase to the sign and told her, politely, that this was a private beach. That he could have done any one of a dozen normal things.

Instead he took the canvas cover off the telescope.

He told himself it was to see who she was. A local girl, probably, from town, who did not know about the sign or did not care. He would see her face, and know whether to go down or not, and that would be that. He swung the big brass tube down from the sky, towards the beach, and bent and put his eye to the glass, and turned the focus wheel.

The world swam, and blurred, and then came clear.

She was so close that he almost stepped back. He could see the drops of sweat on her shoulders. He could see her breathing. He could see the fine dark hair at the nape of her neck, below the high ponytail, wet with sweat. He could see that her bikini was a tiny thing of red string, a tiny top and even tinier bottoms, tied in bows at her neck and her back and her hips, and that her skin was lightly tanned and smooth, and that she had a thin gold chain around her left ankle and a gold ring on one toe.

He could see that she was young. Not a girl. A young woman, twenty or twenty-two, with a long, strong, athlete’s body, and long legs. Very long legs. Legs that went on and on, from her bare heels in the sand to the tiny red bikini bottoms at her hips.

He could see more than that, because the glass was that good and the bikini was that small. The two little cups of her red top were too small for her, and the lower curves of her breasts showed beneath them, pale and round. When she turned side on he saw that the bottom was cut high and narrow at the back, so narrow that it was little more than a strip of red between the cheeks of her bottom, and both cheeks were bare, round and firm and lightly tanned, with a faint pale line where some other, bigger bikini had been the summer before. At the front the little red bottoms sat very low, and when she shifted her weight from one foot to the other it pulled tight against her, and he could see the soft rounded shape of her under the thin red cloth.

He felt himself stir in his old canvas trousers. He had not felt that in four years. He did not step back from the glass.

She turned and looked straight up the beach towards his house.

He froze. But she was not looking at him. She was looking at the dune, and the grass, and the staircase, the way you look at a view. Then she turned back to the sea, rolled her shoulders, shook out her arms, and began.

The Routine

He had never watched a cheerleader train. He had never thought about cheerleaders at all, except as a vague brightness at the edge of televised football games. He did not know what he was looking at. He only knew that he could not stop looking at it.

She started with sprints. Twenty metres along the wet sand at full speed, a hard stop, turn, twenty metres back. Ten times. Her feet threw up spray. Then she stopped, set her feet together, swung her arms down and back and threw herself up into the air, and at the top of the jump her legs flew out to the sides, straight and wide, her toes pointed, her hands reaching to touch them, so that for one impossible moment she hung in the air above the sand with her legs spread straight out to either side, level with her hips, and her hands reaching out to her toes. Then she came down, landed with her feet together and her knees bent, and did it again. And again. Twenty times.

Then the kicks.

She stood with her arms up and out, straight from the shoulders, like a dancer, and kicked. Her right leg came up straight in front of her, faster than he could follow, higher than her head, so high that her knee nearly touched her shoulder, and came down again. Then the left. Right. Left. Each one higher than the one before, her standing foot planted, her body perfectly upright, her face calm. Through the glass he could see the long muscles of her thighs tighten and lengthen with each kick, and her stomach go hard, and the tiny red top and bottoms shift and settle.

On the highest kicks, with her leg straight up beside her head and her body opened wide, the red bikini bottoms pulled tight and sideways between her legs. It was so thin and so stretched that it hid nothing of her shape. He could see the smooth swell of her under it, and the faint line down the middle where the cloth pressed in, and the bare skin at its edges, higher up the insides of her thighs than any bikini had a right to show. Then her leg came down and the cloth settled, and she kicked with the other leg, and it happened again.

He was hard now. Fully, painfully hard, pressed against the railing, at fifty-six years old, on his own roof, at seven o’clock in the morning. He kept both hands on the telescope.

Then she sank down onto the sand. She slid one leg forward and the other back until both were flat on the wet sand in a straight line, front and back, and sat there in a full split as easily as a man sits in a chair, and leaned forward over her front leg until her chest was flat on her thigh. With her body folded forward like that, her bottom was the highest point of her, raised and round and almost bare, the thin red string lost between the cheeks, and the split stretched the front of the little red bottoms so tight against her that he could see the full shape of her through it. She stayed there. She breathed. Then she came up, turned, and did it the other way.

Edward realised that he had not breathed for some time.

He straightened up from the telescope. His back ached. He looked at his watch, and it was twenty past seven. He looked down at the beach with his naked eye, and she was a small red figure on the sand again, far away, doing something with her arms that he could not see.

He bent back to the glass.

At a quarter to eight she stopped, stood with her hands on her hips again for a minute, looked at the sea, and then walked into it. She did not hesitate. The water in June in Maine is barely warmer than in March, and she walked straight in up to her waist and dived under a wave and came up with her hair flattened to her head and her mouth open in a shout he could not hear, and laughed. He could see her laughing. Then she swam, fast and hard, out beyond the small waves and along the beach and back, perhaps five minutes, and came out, and stood dripping on the sand, wringing out her ponytail with both hands.

The cold water had changed the red bikini. It was soaked and clinging, and the thin wet cloth had gone darker and almost sheer, and through the two little cups of her top he could see the dark pink of her nipples, small and hard and drawn up tight from the cold. Water ran down her flat stomach and over the low red bikini bottoms at her hips, and the wet cloth clung to her there so closely that it might have been painted on. When she turned to wring out her hair, the water ran down her bare round cheeks and the backs of her long legs, and there was sand on her bottom where she had sat in the split.

Then she turned and ran back the way she had come, south along the shore towards town, and was gone.

He stood on the roof for a long time after that, looking at the empty beach.

Then he went downstairs to his study, and opened the desk drawer, and took out a new black notebook that his agent had sent him two Christmases ago with a card that said, in her big confident handwriting, For the next one. The notebook had never been opened. He opened it now, and took the pen from the desk, and wrote the date at the top of the first page, and under it, after a long time, one line.

Red. Long legs. Kicks higher than her head. Who is she.

He looked at the line. He thought of tearing out the page.

He closed the notebook and put it back in the drawer. He was still hard. He had been hard for an hour, and he was ashamed of it, and he did not touch himself, because he was not going to be that man, not over a young woman on a beach who did not know he existed.

He went down to the sea instead, and swam out into the fifty-four-degree water until the cold had taken it all away, and then he swam some more.

Eleven Days

She came the next morning, at seven exactly. And the next. And the next.

She came every day except Sunday. She came in the red bikini on most days, and on two of them in a black one, and on one cold grey morning in a pair of tiny black running shorts and a sports bra, and she did the same routine every time: the sprints, the jumps, the kicks, the splits, the swim. Sometimes something new. One morning she practised the same jump fifty times, a jump in which she threw both legs up together in front of her and touched her toes in the air, and kept doing it until it was perfect, and when she landed the last one she punched the air and shouted something at the sea. One morning she did handstands, and walked on her hands along the wet sand, her long legs straight up in the air, her toes pointed at the sky. Upside down, the red bikini top slipped on her breasts, and she did not stop to fix it, and he could see the pale undersides of them almost to the nipple. And when she opened her legs into a wide V at the top of the handstand and held it there, perfectly still, the little red bikini bottoms were the highest thing on the beach, stretched tight between her open thighs.

On the sixth morning the bikini was black, and the black was worse. It was even smaller than the red, and it did not go sheer in the water, but it clung, and against her tan it looked like nothing more than a few black strings and three black scraps of cloth. She did the kicks facing the house that morning. On the highest one she held her leg at the top, straight up beside her head, for a beat longer than she needed to, and he had the strangest feeling, through the glass, that she was holding it for someone.

Edward was on the roof every morning at a quarter to seven.

He told himself a great many things. He told himself that it was a beach, and she was on it, and he was on his own roof, and there was no law against a man looking at his own beach from his own roof. He told himself that she must know someone could see her; she was half naked on a beach below a house with a dozen windows. He told himself that it was a kind of research. That he was a writer, and writers watch. That he had not felt anything at all for four years, not about anything, and that whatever he was feeling now was at least something.

None of it was a reason. He knew that. He kept going up the stairs.

He was hard every morning. Every morning he stood at the railing with his body aching for her and his hands on the brass, and every morning, when she had gone, he did not touch himself. He went down to the cold sea and swam until it stopped. It became a kind of rule. He could look. He could not do anything about looking. It was the only thing that let him go back up the stairs the next day and still call himself a decent man, and he knew perfectly well that it did not.

And every morning, after she had gone, he went down to the study and opened the black notebook and wrote one line.

Black today. Better in red.

Fifty jumps. She does not stop until it is perfect.

Handstands. She walked twenty yards on her hands. Laughed when she fell.

Swam out further than yesterday. The water is fifty-four degrees. She does not seem to notice.

She has a tattoo. Inside the left ankle, above the chain. A small wave.

She looked up at the house today. For a long time.

Celeste

On the Wednesday his agent called.

He let it ring six times before he answered, because he always did, and because she always let it ring until he answered, so it made no difference.

‘You sound different,’ said Celeste Moreno, without saying hello.

She was forty-nine, and she ran the most feared literary agency in New York from a corner office on Fifth Avenue with a view of the park that she never looked at. She had sold his first novel for nine thousand dollars when he was twenty-seven and his last one for nine million when he was fifty, and in the four years since then she had called him every Wednesday at ten o’clock in the morning to ask him the same question.

‘I sound the same,’ said Edward.

‘You do not. You sound like you have been somewhere.’ He heard her lighter click. She had been giving up smoking for as long as he had known her. ‘Are you writing?’

‘No.’

‘Are you thinking about writing?’

‘No.’

‘Edward.’ She blew out smoke, and he could see her, as clearly as if he were in the room, leaning back in her white leather chair with her shoes off and her feet on the desk. ‘Something has happened. I have known you for thirty years. Your voice goes up at the end of sentences when something has happened. It did it in the spring of 2009, and you wrote The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife in eleven weeks.’

‘Nothing has happened,’ said Edward. ‘I bought a telescope.’

There was a silence on the line.

‘A telescope,’ said Celeste.

‘For the stars.’

‘Of course,’ said Celeste. ‘For the stars.’ He heard her put the cigarette down. ‘Well. When you have finished looking at the stars, darling, and you would like to tell somebody what you saw, you know my number.’

She hung up. She always hung up first.

He stood in the kitchen with the phone in his hand. Then he went into the study and opened the drawer and looked at the black notebook for a long time, without taking it out.

Mrs Greer

That last one was on the Friday, the ninth morning, and it was true.

She had finished her routine and was standing at the water’s edge with her hands on her hips, and instead of walking into the sea, she turned and looked up the beach. Up the dune. Up the staircase. Up the white front of his house, the porch, the balcony, all the way to the roof. She stood there for perhaps half a minute. She shaded her eyes with one hand.

He stepped back from the telescope so fast that he nearly knocked it over.

When he looked again, with his naked eye, she was in the sea.

He stood at the railing with his heart beating like a boy’s. Had she seen him? She could not have seen him. Not through the glass. Not at that distance. She might have seen a figure on the roof. A man with a cup of coffee, on his own roof, looking at the sea. That was all. That was nothing.

He went downstairs.

Mrs Greer was in the kitchen, unloading the dishwasher. It was a few minutes after eight. She looked at him as he came in, and he knew that she had been there, in the kitchen, with the window over the sink that looked out at the beach, for at least ten minutes.

He poured himself more coffee. He did not say anything. Neither did she.

She put the last plate away, closed the cupboard, folded the dish towel and hung it on the rail of the stove. Then she turned to him and dried her hands on her apron.

‘That telescope,’ she said.

‘What about it?’

‘The man who brought it said it could see Saturn.’

‘It can.’

Mrs Greer nodded slowly. ‘Saturn is in the sky,’ she said. ‘In the morning, Mr Ashby, Saturn is on the other side of the world.’

She picked up her bucket and went out of the kitchen and up the stairs, and he heard her start the vacuum cleaner in his bedroom.

He stood in the kitchen with his coffee for a long time. Then he laughed, once, quietly, at nobody.

The Mail

On Saturdays he drove into town.

He went for the mail, which he had sent to a box at the post office because the mailman had once taken photographs of his porch, and for groceries, and for a newspaper, and sometimes for breakfast at the Harbor Diner, which served the best eggs in Maine and the worst coffee in the world. He drove an old dark green pickup truck, and he wore his oldest clothes, and most people in Wexley Harbor had long ago stopped looking at him, which was what he wanted.

There were eleven letters in the box that Saturday. Bills. A cheque from a publisher in Germany. Two letters from readers that had found their way to him somehow, one from Ohio and one from Japan. A thick cream envelope from his agent in New York, which he did not open, because he knew what it said. And two letters from Wexley Harbor itself.

The first was in a pale blue envelope, addressed in neat, small, slanted handwriting that he recognised at once, because he had been receiving it for six years. Ellen Marsh, the town librarian. She wrote to him four or five times a year. Long, careful, intelligent letters about his books: what she had noticed in them, what she thought he meant, what she wished he had done differently in the last chapter of the fourth one. She had never once asked for anything. He had never once written back. He did not know why. He put it in his jacket pocket.

The second was on heavy white card with a printed letterhead, a little gold house and the words COLE REALTY, WEXLEY HARBOR & THE MIDCOAST. It was handwritten, in a large, confident, looping hand, in blue ink.

Dear Mr Ashby,

Forgive me for writing to you out of the blue. I run the Wexley Harbor Readers’ Circle, and every single one of our members is a great admirer of your work. I have read every one of your novels at least twice. We would be so honoured if you would consider joining us one evening this summer, for a short reading and a conversation, at whatever date suits you. We are a small and very discreet group and I promise there would be no press of any kind.

With warmest regards and great admiration,

Diane Cole

He stood in the post office for a long time, looking at the name.

Then he folded the card in half, and in half again, and dropped it in the wastepaper basket by the door, and went out to his truck.

The Diner

He had breakfast at the Harbor Diner because he did not want to go home yet.

It was a long low wooden building on the waterfront, with a red neon sign that said EAT in the window and a counter with twelve stools and six booths along the wall, and it had been there since before he was born. It smelled of bacon and coffee and the sea. On Saturday mornings it was full of fishermen and their wives and the summer people who thought it was charming.

He sat at the end of the counter. The waitress, a big cheerful girl called Tammy, brought him coffee and eggs without asking, because he had been ordering the same thing for eleven years.

At the other end of the counter, by the register, sat the owner.

Ruth Cole was eighty-four. She was very small and very thin, with white hair cut short as a man’s and black eyes like a bird’s, and she sat on a high stool by the register every morning from six until two, smoking cigarettes she was not allowed to smoke in the diner she owned, and taking the money, and watching everybody. She had owned the Harbor Diner for fifty-five years. She had outlived two husbands and most of her enemies. She did not like summer people, and she did not like writers, and she had never once in eleven years said good morning to Edward Ashby.

She looked at him now, down the length of the counter. She looked at him for a long time, through the smoke, with her black eyes.

He ate his eggs. He drank his terrible coffee. He did not look at her.

When he went to the register to pay, she took his money and gave him his change and did not say anything. Then, as he turned to go, she said, in a voice like gravel in a bucket:

‘You’re up early these days, Ashby.’

He stopped. ‘I beg your pardon?’

Ruth Cole blew out smoke. ‘My grandson’s boat goes out at five. He says there’s a light on your roof every morning now. Up top. Says it flashes.’ She looked at him with her black bird’s eyes. ‘Says it’s like somebody up there with binoculars.’

‘I have a telescope,’ said Edward. ‘For the stars.’

‘In the morning,’ said Ruth Cole.

‘In the morning,’ said Edward.

She looked at him for a long moment more. Then she took another cigarette from the packet on the counter, and lit it, and turned away to the window and the harbour.

‘You clean that glass, Ashby,’ she said, without looking back. ‘Sun hits it, people can see it for miles.’

The Twelfth Morning

He did not go up to the roof on Sunday, because she never came on Sunday.

He went up on Monday at a quarter to seven, as usual, with his coffee.

He stood by the telescope with his hand on the cover, and thought about what the old woman had said, and about Mrs Greer, and about the folded white card in the wastepaper basket at the post office with its looping blue handwriting. He thought that a sane man would take the telescope down, and carry it back inside, and point it at Saturn at night like it was meant to be pointed, and never write another line in a black notebook about a young woman on a beach.

He took the cover off.

He took out a soft cloth from his pocket first, and cleaned the big lens, carefully, until there was not a speck on it. Then he swung the brass tube down towards the beach, and bent, and looked.

She was there. Seven o’clock. The red bikini.

But she was not running. She was not doing the jumps or the kicks. She was standing at the water’s edge, just below the sign. Just below his sign, at the bottom of his staircase, ten metres from the white post that said PRIVATE BEACH. NO TRESPASSING. Standing with her hands on her hips, and her weight on one long leg, and her head tilted, looking up.

Looking up at his house.

At his roof.

Through the glass, he could see her face clearly for the first time. Wide grey-green eyes under straight dark brows. High cheekbones. A wide mouth. A face he did not know, and yet a face that made something stir in him that he could not place, the way a song stirs you when you have heard it before and cannot remember where.

She was looking straight up at the roof deck.

Then she smiled. A slow, wide, wicked smile. And she lifted one hand, very slowly, and waved.

Edward Ashby stood with his eye to the most expensive telescope in New England and did not move.

On the beach below, the young woman in the red bikini turned, walked past his sign, dropped her towel on his sand, and walked into his sea.