Chapter 1: 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.