Silver Bay Read Online Free PDF Page B

results of success: heavy traffic, drunken holidaymakers, an endless round of updating and installation. The loss of peace.
    In Silver Bay I liked to think we had the balance about right – enough visitors to provide us with a living, not so many that anyone was likely to start getting ideas. For years now I had watched Silver Bay’s population rise and double during the summer peak, drifting down in the winter months. The growth of interest in whale-watching had caused the odd peak now and then, but in general it was steady business, likely neither to make us rich nor cause too many upsets. It was just us, the dolphins and the whales. And that suited most of us fine.
    Silver Bay had never been particularly hospitable to strangers. When the first Europeans arrived in the late eighteenth century, it was dismissed at first as uninhabitable, its rocky outcrops, its bushland and shifting dunes too barren to support human life. (I guess back then the Aboriginals weren’t considered human enough.) The coastal shoals and sandbars put paid to too much interest, grounding and wrecking visiting ships until the first lighthouses were erected. Then, as ever, greed did what curiosity could not: the discovery of lucrative timber forests up and down our volcanic hills, and the vast beds of oysters below did for the bay’s solitude.
    The trees were logged until the hillsides were near-barren. The oysters were harvested for lime and, later, for eating, until that was banned before they, too, were depleted. If I’m honest, when my father first landed here he was no better: he saw the seas leaping with gamefish – marlin and tuna, sharks and spearfish – and he saw profit in what nature had provided. An endless array of prizes on his doorstep. And so, on this last rocky outcrop of Silver Bay, our hotel was built with every last penny of his and Mr Newhaven’s savings.
    Back then, my family lived in quarters completely separate from the rest of the Silver Bay Hotel. My mother didn’t like to be seen by guests in what she called ‘domestic mode’ – I think that meant without her hair done – while my father liked to know that there were limits on how much access my sister and I had to the world outside (not that that stopped Norah: she was off to England before she hit twenty-one). I always suspected they wanted to be sure that they could argue in private.
    Since the west wing burnt down we – or, for the most part, I – had lived in what remains as if it were a private house and our guests boarders. They slept in the rooms off the main corridor, while we had the rooms on the other side of the stairs, and anyone was welcome to use the lounge. Only the kitchen was sacred, a rule we made when the girls first came to live with me a few years ago. They were complete opposites. When Liza was not outside with the crews, she spent all her time in the kitchen. She disliked casual conversation, and avoided the lounge and the dining room. She liked to have a closed door between her and the unexpected. Hannah, with the conviviality of youth, spent most of her time draped across the sofa in the lounge, Milly at her feet, watching television, reading or, more often now, on the telephone to her friends – goodness knows what they found to talk about having already spent six hours together at school.
    ‘Mum? Have you ever been to New Zealand?’ As she entered the kitchen, I saw a deep indent running down the side of her cheek from the binding of the sofa cushion where her face must have been resting on it.
    Liza reached out absently to try to smooth it away. ‘No, sweetheart.’
    ‘I have,’ I said. I was darning an old pair of socks, which Liza told me was a waste of my energy when the supermarket sold them for a few dollars a pack. But I’m not the kind of person who can sit and do nothing. ‘I went to Lake Taupo a few years ago on a fishing trip.’
    ‘I don’t remember that,’ said Hannah.
    I calculated. ‘Well . . . I suppose