My destruction occurred forty years ago, in the space of a single month. Recovery took somewhat longer. But I triumphed. I am still at Point House, looking out over the cliff at my familiar bay. I have lived here, unguarded, for twenty-five years. That counts for something in the survival stakes, wouldn't you say? 

Sane? As much as any woman can be who's learned to keep herself to herself. Regarding the past, it is not a subject on which I am ever likely to achieve a settled view. It doesn't do to depend on love. Let me leave it at that for the moment. 

I keep pretty quiet. The garden's my passion. I'm up by seven and out there for as long as I've light to see by. I had Silas Cooper at the hardware shop out from Falmouth last year. Fixed me up a couple of tree-lamps so that I could work on after sundown. I told him how I almost pitched off the cliff-path hunting for my trowel one night and he slapped a coat of luminous paint on all my tool handles then and there. Free of charge. On account of my being a good customer, he said, though I never spent more than two dollars a year in his shop. Too fancy and tricksy for my taste, the stuff he gets in. I told him so, but he just laughed. 

When I'm done with working in the garden for the night, I settle down with a sandwich and hot soup at my desk by the window, try to gather my thoughts and make a tidy shape out of 

them. Everything has to be set down now, but writing isn't my trade. I always seem able to find an excuse, drawers to be tidied, photographs that need sorting out, anything that keeps my hands busy. If they're busy, they can't fluster me. 

Prattling on paper like this may be the way to get going. It's even becoming pleasantly conversational, like talking to a friend in another room. Not that I'm lonely. Why should I be? 

And why should I not? Be honest with yourself, Nancy. If I am occasionally a little downhearted, I've no one to blame but myself. Living to an old age has become a kind of victory over circumstances, but I haven't yet learned to behave as the old should. I'm not grateful, and I'm not tolerant, and I don't like small talk. That should be enough to keep away those well-meaning souls, newcomers all, who make a vocation out of doing good to those who never did enough harm to deserve it. 

It doesn't stop them at all. I had a whole rash of them over the place this summer, worse than measles. 

- Oh, Mrs Brewster, we wondered if we could help care for your beautiful garden. 

- if we could persuade you to join the Golden Age Voyagers' Club. 

- if we could take you on a visit to the church ... the whaling museum ... the old harbour. 

I do my best to be polite. Why should I be, when all they've come is a peek at the hermit, for a spoonful of gossip to be carried off and shared out at the next club convention. I see the gleam in their eyes as they shout their charitable invitations. I used to see such faces in my nightmares, pressed up against the bars, watching for the freakshow to begin. 

There have been occasions when I've felt sufficiently angered by these intruders to show them the door with a donation to their chosen cause, as if they were no better than hawkers. On the whole, I'm gracious. Point House always had a reputation for hospitality and I'm proud enough to cherish family traditions. I thank them for their thoughtfulness and explain that gardening and housecare don't leave me the time for outings. Then I call Joe Finnis in to give them a tour of the place. That's what they've come for, apart from a personal sighting of the freak. Joe's job is to see that they don't start taking cuttings from the shrubs. They ask him questions, of course. But he's a good boy, Joe. He doesn't give any secrets away. He came here too late to have any worth the telling. Isabel and her followers had gone south by the time I returned in the summer of nineteen fifty-four. For which, while sceptical of any power above nature, I am prepared to thank God. 

I love this house. I always have. Every summer, when my parents and brother left the house in Louisburg Square to visit my mother's family in Vermont, I came here, to spend three months with my father's older, childless brother, Caleb Parker, and Aunt Louise. They treated me as if I was their own daughter and, for all the old-fashioned ritual of their ways, they offered me an ease I never knew in my parents' house. 

They called this the Gold Coast in those days, on account of the millionaires who were building themselves Tudor palaces and baronial castles above the shore. But the Parkers were the first to settle the place and my aunt and uncle kept themselves as distant from the newcomers as I, for other reasons, do now. They lived in a different world, in a different time. Walking along the shore when the tide was out, I heard the telephones dinging in the houses on the cliffs above me. The newcomers' big yachts swam out of Falmouth harbour each day like a flock of haughty white swans; their long shiny cars went tooting and swerving along the narrow roads with never a stop for the beauty of the overhanging woods or a glimpse of dark water between the trees. No more sense in them than in a flock of sandpipers hopping this way, then that way over the glistening sand washed down by the waves. 

I had just turned seven when my mother brought me here for the first time in the summer of 1914. 

'Will you stay too?' I asked her in the car. 

She shook her head. 'I've told you so many times now, Nancy - don't you ever listen? Daddy and I will be taking Michael to Aunt Sarah for the summer. The doctor says the sea air will do you good. You need to get your appetite back. You haven't been well.' She shot a look at me as I slipped my hands between my legs and the hot sticky leather of the passenger seat. 'Uncle Caleb and Aunt Louise aren't as young as they were,' she said. 'It's kind of them to offer to have you, but they've no knowledge of children. 'Just try not to cause any trouble.' 

I shut my eyes and closed her out, letting the roar of the engine fill my ears. 

My first visit. I saw tall green woods and the house nestling beyond and above them, lying at the highest level of a terraced lawn. The car crunched gravel. I jumped out before my mother could stop me and ran in through the open door. 

I saw long cool rooms, hushed by canvas blinds and smelling of roses and lavender. A wind from beyond blew against the blinds and spattered them with shadows. If I closed my eyes, I was on a ship under sail for the tropics. 

'Nancy? Nancy! Come back here at once before I - ' 

I ducked under a blind and came out onto a broad, stone-flagged terrace. Below me, bright as a tray of silver, I saw the bay, curving forward from a white arc of sand. Out in the water, straight ahead of me, a little island of yellow rock and rough grasses jutted up from the sea. White wings wheeled over the sand; the air vibrated with shrieks and cries and the low lion's roar of the sea. I stood still as if my feet had turned to roots. 

A hand lay on my shoulder. I looked up to see my uncle Caleb peering down at me and smiling in the shy way he had. 

'Well now, Nancy, and would you like to go down there?' 

I nodded. 'Take this along,' he said, handing me a little tin pail. 'Follow the path down to the right and see what you can find for us.' He glanced at my fancy little city shoes. 'I'd take those off first. Barefoot's best, but don't tell your dear mother I said so or we'll both be in trouble.' 

I stayed down on the shore for the best part of two hours and came back panting and triumphant with a harvest of pale oyster-turret shells and the plump hollow body of a cushion star. 

'Quite a treasure trove, Nancy,' Uncle Caleb said. 'But we'll see if you and I can't find something even better before you go home.' 

'Not on the rug, my chere,' Aunt Louise whispered in her soft foreign accent as I started arranging my trophies on the floor. I pretended not to hear her. 

'Don't make me ashamed of you.' My mother spoke against my ear as she bent to kiss me. 'We've had enough trouble already.' 

I clung to her hand. 'Will I have a nightlight in my room?' 

'At night! At your age!' My aunt's sandy lashes fluttered open. Her eyes were very blue and soft. 'She's surely a little old to be afraid of the dark, Evelyn dear? Or is it something that the doctor - .' Her voice trailed away uncertainly. It seemed to me that she was a little frightened of my mother. 

'Nothing to do with doctors.' My mother's narrow fingers nipped the flesh from my shoulder. 'We don't want any more of your nonsense, Nancy. Stop it now. This minute.' 

I knew better than to say any more. But I cried so hard when Aunt Louise put me to sleep in a black room with not even the glint of a passage light under the door for comfort, that she took pity on me and pulled open the curtains on a sky as bright as a box of diamonds. Then she bent down and put the starfish I had picked up on the beach under my bed. 'There you are now,' she said. 'Stars in the heavens and a pretty little star of your own under the bed. Nothing to harm you now, my chere.' Sobbing, uncomforted, I shook my head until she sat down on the edge of the quilt and took my hands in hers, gently rubbing them. 'What frightens you so much, poor little Nancy? Won't you tell me?' 

I couldn't say. I would have let her throw me into the cold salt waves before I told her the cause of my distress. But she was right. There was no threat in the whispering, sea-filled darkness of Point House. And, when I held my five-pointed trophy in my hand and looked out at the growling sea and the glitter of starlight on the waves, wonder swallowed up my fear. Soon, I could hear the creaking of floorboards without feeling a responsive flutter of terror, of wings beating against my ribs. I began to loiter near the kitchen door in the hope of treats between meals from the slow old cook. My cheeks grew pink. Aunt Louise made cuts in the side of my dresses to give me room to breathe. 

'I'd hardly know her for the same child,' she remarked to Caleb after one of these operations. 

'Rosy as a peach,' said Caleb. 'You'll have to make us another visit, Nancy. Would you like that?' 

'Most of anything,' I said. And, for once, went uncorrected. 

Because I was a child, I saw nothing as eccentric. It seemed to me tedious but unremarkable that we should drink hot water out of yellow Worcester cups every afternoon because Aunt Louise didn't care to waste the contents of her teacaddy on family occasions. 

There was no quarrelling at Point House, although my aunt and uncle divided in their passions as neatly as astrological signs. Louise, brought up in Normandy, had given her heart to the earth and everything that grew in it, while my uncle cared only for the sea and the sky. A feather or the broken rim of a shell were all he needed to identify the owner; every singular fish he had caught was mounted in the hall in its own iridescent skin. It was from Caleb that I learned about the wreck of the Hesperus not far from our shore and of how the skipper's dead daughter was found floating on the water, bound to the mast by her own father to save her from drowning. My uncle sat by my bedside one summer when I was ill, telling me tales of the sea and reciting - he had it all by heart - the poem I loved to hear. 

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice, 

With the masts, went by the board; 

Like a vessel of glass, she strove and sank, 

'Ho! Ho! the breakers roared. 

Caleb was a natural story-teller, although I wonder now at the kind of tales he chose for a child. Of a privateer that took two English prizes and vanished the next day, with a hundred and thirty men aboard, never to be seen again. And of a cruelly cold winter when a cart bringing blocks of granite overland for one of the new houses along the shore went through the ice and down into the long salt marsh inland from Point House, drowning the driver and the oxen. He showed me where the granite blocks could still be seen, buried in the reedy water. But Caleb told his stories with a smile and I never trembled as I did at the cautionings against wilfulness that came with my mother's readings of the old fairy tales. 

My uncle was a tender-hearted man. I remember when Aunt Louise told him to shoot the heron which had been taking carp out of the ornamental pond. I offered to go along with him, seeing how sad his eyes were as he strapped an old cartridge bag over his shoulders and peered down the dusty barrel of his rifle. He did it with his first shot, brought that lovely sharp-beaked predator down to lie like a ghost in the grass, and then he burst out crying, caught hold of my hand and gripped it as though he meant never to let go again. He stayed in his room for the next two days, refusing to answer my aunt when she hammered on the door. I never heard the heron mentioned again. 

Sailing, not shooting, was my uncle's passion; Louise used to say that his schooner, the Dryad, was as troublesome as having another woman about the place. But the Dryad was more of a refuge than a threat, an escape from my aunt's gentle insistence on the fulfilment of local obligations and duties in which Caleb took no interest. I was sixteen and spending my tenth summer at Point House when my uncle gave me a pretty little racing sloop and taught me how to master her giddy ways. I sailed her into Falmouth harbour the next year. I was so proud. I wouldn't have exchanged her for any of the yachts and schooners belonging to our neighbours, although she looked no bigger than a cockleshell bobbing in the shadows cast down by their gleaming hulls. That year still has a kind of glow on it when I look back. Nineteen twenty-three. The last summer before Louise died and those gentle interludes at Point House, the high point of my early life, came to an end. 

My uncle named his boat in teasing acknowledgement of my aunt's nature-loving activities. The well-ordered garden was her province, but she seemed happiest when she let me follow her into the rustling woods beyond it, separating us from the outside world. If I grew up knowing where to look for a saw-whet owl in the thick foliage of a hickory tree, or the red eyes of a whip-poor-will glinting up from a drift of fall leaves, I have my aunt to thank for it. Even now, I only have to sniff the shavings from a new pencil to remember the red cedar she showed me when she was trying to cure my fear of the dark. And I still smile. 

Louisa was convinced that my fear of darkness could be helped by the trees in which she placed an almost mystic trust. I was eight when she first bandaged my eyes with a strip of cotton and led me, her light papery hand clasping mine, into the green depths where willows and cottonwoods and creaking elms shut out the sky. Each time I snivelled and fumbled with the knot in the material behind my ears, she pressed my hand to a trunk or leaf, telling me to remember how it felt before I heard the name. From her, I learned how to tell the silk-smooth bark of an alder from the light, breaking skin of a birch. Gently rubbing my hot arms with velvety mullein leaves, she taught me how to ease the salty pain of sunburned flesh; giving me a sappy stem of cow parsnip to munch as we went along, she told me how to distinguish the flower head from its similar, poisonous hemlock cousins. 

Further on, deep in the tawny, tangled labyrinth of the forest, was Astarte's Grove, a circle of white oaks, osiers and birches enclosing a dark pond. Light flecked the surface of the water with yellow motes, but the air was always rank. Sinewy branches of undergrowth trapped my ankles, holding me fast; the darkness of the water, so still, so unimaginably deep, suggested hidden things, slow moving, blind. The place filled me with terror, but here, unluckily, my aunt had captured some of her finest butterfly specimens and here I was compelled to stand and watch with unbandaged eyes while she darted and stumbled after an elusive skipper or peacock, later to be pinned and added to her collection. 

Years later, I discovered that witches used to meet in Astarte's Grove and make all kinds of ghoulish sacrifices for their spells. I knew nothing about that when I was a child but the place filled me with dread. Even now, I cannot bring myself to go there. But that is for a different reason. 

I respected and feared my parents. I was torn between love and resentment for Michael, my older brother. My uncle and aunt were the only relations for whom I felt unqualified tenderness. I never felt so sad as when the southbound swallows began to swirl and eddy over the chimneys of Point House and I knew that the time had come for me to travel back to Boston. 
 
 

Thinking about those days has made me sentimental. There is danger in that. There is dishonesty in sentiment and I have committed myself to being entirely truthful. 

I have only one audience in mind for this story and I am not such a fool as to suppose that my memories of childhood summers here will be of any great interest to them. My two granddaughters, Judith and Catherine. It's five years now since I last saw them. Judith turned eighteen last month. I wonder who she looks like now. As a little girl, she reminded me of my husband. The same light brown hair and quick hazel eyes. There were times when it actually hurt to look at her. 

I wrote to their mother a couple of years ago, reminding her that the house is big and that it could easily be divided up between us with no discomfort to me. She never answered. I don't intend to humiliate myself by repeating the invitation. 

My daughter Eleanor is a shrewd woman. She has not had an easy time, not altogether, but she has made the most of herself. I'm told that she has quite a reputation now as an attorney. I doubt if such a successful career leaves much time for the girls. I could have given them all of mine. However. However. 

I can't blame her for wanting to keep the girls away from me. Eleanor has her reasons for being uneasy, even afraid. I took notice of her feelings the last time they were up here in the summer of seventy-four. I wanted to take Judith and Cathy out in my old dory to the Point, to show them where to pick up the shells of Angel Wings and fiddler crabs, washed in on the spring tides and stranded high on the mossy ledges of rock. This was my own secret place when I was young and I wanted them to share it, to feel the thrill I had known when I first discovered the place. But just as the children were wading out at the side of the boat and shrieking at the coldness of the water, Eleanor came hammering down the cliff path. The girls were laughing until they saw her; I think they shared my relief at being away from her guard dog eyes. Eleanor's face was red as a beet as she came running across the sand, arms waving like semaphore flags, hair flapping down her back. I laid down the oars. 

'You'll give yourself a heart attack tearing about like that,' I said. 'Now don't tell me you came all the way down here to say they can't go.' 

I'm sure she meant to be diplomatic, but the excuses poured out of her mouth with such crazy fluency that even the girls could have guessed she was terrified. The tides were unpredictable, the coast guard had informed her. Judith and Cathy already had more shells than they knew what to do with in the apartment. I hadn't checked the life-jackets. And on. And on. I didn't say a word. I knew what she didn't have the courage to say. And I just kept looking at her. 

We climbed the path back to the house in silence. 

Ó Miranda Seymour 1998