Free Looking at the Moon by Kit Pearson Page A

Catherine taking what they called their “constitutional.”
    Aunt Catherine was amazingly spry for someone in her eighties. Her wiry body moved through the water as easily as Norah herself, as she performed her usual ten strokes out and ten strokes in. Bosley accompanied her all the way.
    Aunt Florence didn’t really swim. Her figure was encased in a ballooning flowered bathing suit she called her “swimming costume” and her head was wrapped in a kind of turban. She let herself awkwardly down the ladder, then heaved herself in, flopping about and spewing water like a whale. Then she emerged, as proud as if she had swum a marathon. All the children suppressed giggles behind their towels.
    Denny jumped in again and again, buoyed up by his life-jacket. George was having a swimming lesson. UncleGerald stood at the edge of the dock and held him up by a rope tied around his middle. “Thatta boy! You’re doing fine!” he called. The little boy splashed and kicked valiantly. All the other cousins bobbed around him.
    Aunt Mary sat in the shade under the roofed part of the dock, deep in a new book called The Robe . Uncle Reg sat in the sun, a knotted white handkerchief draped on top of his bald head. He squinted at his needlepoint. This summer he’d asked Aunt Florence to teach him. His sisters teased him but he retorted that he didn’t see why a man couldn’t be as good at needlepoint as a woman. Now he and Aunt Florence were having a competition to see who could finish a cushion cover first.
    Aunt Bea and Aunt Dorothy came down from the changing room that was next to the Girls’ Dorm. They sat beside Norah, dangling their feet in the lake and fanning themselves. “I always hate the first plunge,” said Aunt Bea. “The only problem with this side of the island is that there’s no shore. When I was little I thought there was a sea monster down there!”
    Uncle Reg chuckled. “That’s because once I dived underneath and grabbed your ankle—do you remember?”
    â€œOf course I do!” bristled Aunt Bea. “It was very naughty and Father was right to punish you.”
    Norah listened to the two of them bickering as if they were children again. It was so hard to believe that any of the Elders had been young.
    While everyone was resting after lunch she had made a secret inspection of the cottage walls for pictures ofAndrew. She recognized him in several family groups: a solemn page boy in a kilt at Uncle Gerald’s wedding; squeezed between Flo and Clare at a picnic. He didn’t look much different when he was Norah’s age, though his hair had been lighter and his face not as lean.
    If he were her age she could be his friend as easily as she was friends with Bernard in the city. Then she wouldn’t catch her breath every time she looked at him. Friendship would be much more restful; but there was nothing she could do to stop her love. It ran her, as if she were a puppet dangling on its strings.
    When she’d found all the pictures of Andrew, Norah turned to a photograph that had been pointed out to her again and again: the first generation of Elders as children, sitting on the steps of the newly built Gairloch. Three sisters and a brother, the girls in white dresses and black stockings. As usual she felt sorry for them, dressed so uncomfortably in the summer. Thirteen-year-old Aunt Florence looked as haughty and confident as she did now. She didn’t seem to have found it confusing to be a teen-ager. Beside her, in order of age, sat Christina, Bea (pouting) and little Reg, who was smiling mischievously.
    On the wall beside Aunt Florence’s chair hung a picture of her son, Hugh, who had been killed in World War I. He was standing alone on the verandah, dressed in his uniform. His open, eager face laughed at the camera, as if he could never die.
    Norah glanced at a few recent photographs that included her and Gavin. After they left