Read Online High Tide at Noon by Elisabeth Ogilvie - Free Book Online

unclamp her teeth. The rest of the family were at the dinner table. As she dipped cold water into the wash basin, she heard Philip’s mild voice.
    â€œTom Robey at Brigport has a seine he’ll sell cheap. The way the dogfish rammed around in the net at the end of seining last fall, we ought to have a new one before we go again.”
    â€œListen,” young Stevie piped up. “Why can’t I go with the seinin’ crew this year?”
    â€œYou ain’t old enough,” said Mark, with the superiority of thirteen over eleven. “What would you do with them little pindlin’ arms?”
    â€œWhat do you do?” said Stevie truculently.
    â€œBoys,” said Donna, and they subsided.
    Stephen said in his moderate way, “I’d want to see any seine Tom Robey’s selling, before I bought it.”
    â€œHe’s the lyin’est bastard that ever feet hung on and was called a man,” said Owen cheerfully, “but does he make money bootleggin’! Cripes! ”
    â€œWhat’s bootleggin’?” inquired Stevie.
    â€œNever mind, son,” murmured Donna. “Owen, eat your dinner.”
    â€œThe Robey boys told me they’d make me a partner . . . meet schooners outside the Rock—”
    â€œOwen, you heard your mother.” Stephen sounded final. At another time Joanna would have grinned. Owen was trying to stir things up a little, and nobody would be stirred. They only told him to shut up and eat his dinner, as if he were Mark or Stevie. But today she felt as if she would never want to laugh again.
    She couldn’t keep on drying her hands indefinitely. She must go in there, and when she sat down they would see her, and in spite of their love and their belief in her, a silence would settle heavily upon them.
    For one breathless instant she thought of telling them the whole story. But she knew at once that it was impossible, that she couldn’t stand there under the searching gaze of all those masculine eyes and her mother’s cool and measuring glance. The very thought of it sent color rushing hotly over her neck and face—a wave of heat across her whole body. Now, for them, she was innocent. But not after she told them about Simon Bird. They would never understand it in a thousand years; even she couldn’t understand it now. The moment in the orchard seemed a moment in a shameful dream a long time ago.
    They could forgive her for being talked about, lied about; but they couldn’t forgive her for meeting Simon Bird.
    She pulled out her chair and sat down. The younger boys kept arguing, and Philip, beside her, said, “Ahoy, Tiddleywinks!” Owen said, “Hi, brat,” and went on eating baked haddock. Her mother smiled, her father nodded pleasantly, and they continued discussing the probability of the mailboat’s running every day this summer instead of three times a week. Joanna looked at her heaped plate; baked stuffed haddock and mealy potatoes, swiss chard canned last summer. It was her favorite dinner but she couldn’t eat it with that twisting, tightening knot where her stomach was. And she couldn’t eat hot gingerbread with whipped cream, either.
    Somehow the meal passed. Charles came in, and the eternal shop talk began again. Joanna made herself relax. It would be a good hour before she could escape either to her room or to the woods beyond Goose Cove. A vision rose before her eyes, a vision of a place she had found deep in the woods, where the silence was walled in by great spruces and she could walk in a cool green gloom pierced by thin, infrequent spears of sungold. A place where the soundless flight of hawks through the branches only increased her solitude.
    Never, it seemed to her, had the Bennetts been so gay, so talkative, so noisy. Almost as if they were making a special effort to show her nothing bothered them.
    At last she could clear the table and wash the dishes; at last the house was