Free The Dawning of the Day by Elisabeth Ogilvie

remembered anger, her tone sharp. “May Gerrish told me to my face he was stupid, but I told her that he was smarter than all the rest of us put together. He knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get it, too!”
    Philippa watched him now and wondered if the warm lustrous day, the silver eddies behind his oars, the motion of his boat, had any power to move him.
    Others came after him. The calm was broken into continuously changing patterns of wake crossing wake, of water splashing against the rocks, of gulls that flew up with a strong beating of wings and then settled into the swells again. Whenever Philippa recognized a boat, she had a warming sense of achievement. She liked to fill Eric’s letters with details about the Kestrel , the White Lady II , Joanna S ., Susan C ., the Sea Pigeon . She wished now for a notebook to record all that she had seen and smelled and heard this afternoon.
    But writing wouldn’t be enough; she could feel the words crowding painfully into her throat, the need to see the fast blaze of understanding in Eric’s eyes. Her consciousness of Sky and Rob only increased her longing. Why should she be dealing with other little boys and not her own? She thought, I must do something about getting him out here. . . . If I could have a couple of rooms somewhere . . . perhaps in that boarded-up house.
    She saw him in shorts and jersey, standing at the edge of the water where the Kestrel ’s wake still rushed against the rocks, a slender and yet not fragile silhouette with an indomitable resilience to it. Justin’s boy and hers; brown hair that grew back from his forehead as hers did, with the widow’s peak; Justin’s eyes, as purely gray as rain; a way of standing that was Justin’s, too; but he had her own swift excitement in a new experience and her way of secretly hoarding it afterward.
    Where there had been two who loved, there became three. They had created him between them, Justin and Philippa. And as she saw Eric on the rocks, she saw Justin beside her, in his old slacks, smoking and watching the goldfinches. Why had they never known a place or a time like this? They had been cheated of too much. It gave her no comfort to tell herself, as she had been telling herself for eight years, that she was only one of millions of women to whom the war had become as intimate as a disease working fatally within them. There was no comfort anywhere, ever again. The knowledge had not grown less in eight years. She still felt that the injury which had been done her was irreparable.
    When she smelled tobacco smoke sharp across the redolence of spruce and grass, she wondered for a panicky moment if her grief were turning to madness. She turned her head carefully and saw Young Charles standing at the edge of the trees. He looked back at her without speaking, then blew smoke from his nostrils, dug a hole in the earth with his heel, ground out the cigarette carefully and buried it. Then he walked down the slope toward her. He had a slim, compact build and wore his dungarees and rubber boots with an air that surely would have impressed Eric much more than any television cowboy.
    â€œDid I scare you?” he asked in his soft voice, and smiled.
    â€œYes,” she said. The past receded and she was grateful to him. He sat down on the rock beside her, pushing back his cap and narrowing his eyes against the sun until they were a dark glittering line behind the thick lashes. Philippa looked across the blue miles to the dark lilac waves of the mainland hills, and Charles looked at her. Why? she asked him silently. I’m thirty years old and tired from fighting battles with myself. Thirty is young enough when you count it in years, but I’m not young. The years don’t matter when you count it my way.
    She wanted so much to say it aloud that she spoke hastily. “I’ve been watching the boats come home. Little boats, big boats, all kinds of boats.”
    â€œGuess you