Sea Hearts (15 page)

Around the top of Crescent we strode. ‘I used to come here as a girl,’ Mam cried to me, ‘and walk about, and dream of running away. I thought I could make anything of myself, back then. Rollrock felt so
puny
! I was after something better and brighter.’ Her teeth flashed in the moonlight. ‘And then I mistook Odger for that thing — he
was
better and brighter, to begin with, while we courted. But he did not stay that way, and after a time I could not revive it in him, and the rest has been the same dull round-and-round that you know of so well.’

We nearly missed the little path beyond the Crescent cliffs. It looked as if it led off into nothing, that path, into a last step out into night air and then, after a gasp and half a scream, into the swill and rock-forest below. But no, it ducked in under a lip of rock there, and along and along, then down and doubling back it wove — so constricted that Mam used hardly to be able to fit down, following our tiny feet to cram herself into Stony Cottage with us and pretend to sip a cup of seawater tea and nibble the edge of a sand-and-weed cake.

‘I will show that Odger,’ Mam said as we followed the grey thread of path all around Cave Cove, the wind swiping at us like a cat’s-paw at a mousehole, never quite hooking us out.

We crept up on the mouth of the cave we’d called Stony Cottage. I rather hoped we would find it empty, for then we could use it ourselves, to get out of the weather awhile. But just as Mam was about to poke her head around and look in, the wind dropped for a moment, and in that moment Naseby cried out, all strained and joyful, ‘God, woman, what are you doing to me!’

Mam stepped across to the mouth, her hand back so as I wouldn’t follow and see. ‘She’s doing what your wife Sophie ought to be doing, I dare say.’

A dreadful silence fell in there. A girl’s voice questioned, but the wind blew up and stopped my hearing the words.

‘Come on out, laddy-boy,’ Mam said. ‘You’ve a wife and babs after your company.’

Nase said something.

‘Where else would you be?’ she said. ‘Where else is there to hide?’ I was glad she didn’t give me the credit for having guessed the place.

Then he was there, pale, naked, bending over her in the black entrance, a clump of clothes hiding his boy-bits. ‘Mam, Mam, you won’t tell, will you? Mam, I can put her back. Right away, right now. Her cast is just up over the meadow. No one need know. Sophie need never know.’

‘Please, Naseby Winch,’ said the girl, her voice all pleasant music. ‘Let me go home. My sisters will miss me.’

‘Dress yourself,’ Mam said to Nase. ‘And you? I suppose you’ve no more than that blanket, to make you decent?’

‘She can put her
skin
on, Mam! She can be gone! I shall run and fetch it.’

‘You won’t,’ said Mam. ‘It does not suit my purposes. Here, she can wear my petticoat.’

She stepped into the cave, and I moved forward and looked in. Nase was excruciated, cringing there, shivering, his back to me, his skinny backside — what was that wife feeding him? The seal-girl was seated on the blanket, watching my mam work her petticoat out from under her skirt. She looked quite unfrightened, and very beautiful, and the smell! Like a summer sea, it was, a breeze off living saltwater, a waft of warmth, while all else was echoes of the cold noising sea.

Mam held out her petticoat. ‘There you go. That will wrap you more than once, such a mouse you are.’

‘Mam!’

‘Come along now, come along.’

‘Mam!’

‘Too late, Naseby. Don’t waste breath begging.’

‘Please, though!’

‘It’s time, my lad, to face the size of what you’re doing. It’s more than a dally in this cave-house, lad. It’s more than a hot moment between this lady’s legs. There’s me, you see, and Sophie, such as she is that you married her. There’s Tommy and Myrtle, hanging off your loyalty. Throwing you in, assuming you feel any shame, that’s five at least people in this town that will never lift their heads again, because of the ridiculous picture you’ve just painted before me.’

‘All the more reason, then —’

‘All the more reason to
dress,
boy!’

The seal-girl stood, tall and not trying to cover anything of herself. ‘If you would only give me my coat,’ she said reasonably, to Naseby, to Mam. She even cast me an appealing look, before Mam put the petticoat over her head.

She did not fight or protest; she watched as Mam pulled the petticoat down, manoeuvred her arms free of it, then brought it up to tie under her arms. ‘She is like a doll,’ I said. ‘She just lets you.’

‘Oh, they’ll go where they’re pushed, these women, if there’s no prospect of escape to animate them towards the sea. No wonder the menfolk like them. Pah, you’re swimming in this dress, girl! Well, you will just have to swim.’ She tied the ties ferociously tight. ‘Come, then.’

‘You are taking us to Sophie?’ said Nase frightenedly, buttoning his pants.

‘I am taking you to Dad.’

‘What for?’

‘You go,’ Mam told him at the door. He went, and Mam ushered the maid out, the petticoat blowing up around her, giving us a fine view of her neat bottom and long legs, her tiny feet hardly showing ahead of her ankles.

‘What does Dad need to know for?’ Naseby bellowed back to Mam along the rock wall.

‘I’ve to prove to him. I said this would be the way of it and I’ve to show him.’

A long argument came out of his mouth. Some of it blew over his shoulder to us, the rest broke against the rocks or was swept up the cliff by the wind. ‘ — telling — Sophie — anyway — ’

‘Move along, the both of you. I want my supper.’

All the way home Nase pled and complained. Mam didn’t answer him; he seemed to have taken himself beyond her caring; this time she would not come aiding him.

After a while the girl caught him up and took his hand. I thought he might have the decency to throw her off in disgust at himself, but he clutched the hand as he walked unsteadily on.

‘My eldest,’ Mam muttered beside me. ‘You think they are gems and pearls, your little ones; you pour yourself into them, watch them grow, wait for them to make you proud. And then all of a sudden they are just as besmutched and low-motived as everyone else, and worse than some of the Potshead people you’ve always despised. The bab you carried and bore and fed tosses away your good name for a night or two’s tumbling in Stony Cottage with Miss Long-Limbs here, Miss Moves-Like-Enchantment. Look at her! She’s finer in my petticoat than I was in my wedding dress.’

I walked alongside Mam’s disgust, in a daze myself, across the town. Nobody met us; Naseby looked aside at each house, though, cringing at who might come out, or who might pull aside their curtain, hearing our steps in the street.

We came to our door. ‘Go on,’ Mam told Naseby, when he hesitated.

‘Please, Mam? I will take her back. I will find her coat and — ’

‘Lift the latch, Nase. It’s too late for any of that now.’

‘Curse you, Mam,’ he said nearly weeping.

‘Curse yourself, boy. You brought this down entirely on yourself.’

He opened the door and we went in. It was so quiet inside, so warm! I closed the door behind us and we were stiff-still, all three of us. The front room was empty, the fire low; Dad must have sent the boys to bed and gone to do work out the back. Naseby wrung the seal-girl’s hand. The girl, the nameless girl, radiated beauty there; our house looked like the house of peasants, and Mam and even Nase looked wrinkled, reddened, worn out from rough living, peasant work and the endless scouring of the wind.

Mam took off her coat and handed it to me.

‘Excuse me.’ She edged around Nase and the girl. Through to the kitchen she went; there was the scrape of a bowl taken from the shelf, the clack of ladle in the pot of kale-broth we had had for supper; Mam liked to see us all fed and then be left in peace to her own meal. ‘Odger?’ she called out. The bowl clunked to the table, the spoon rang down beside it, a chair was pulled out and sat in. I realised how motionless we were, here in the front room, and tried to break the spell, hanging up Mam’s coat, and then my own.

Dad came in the back door. ‘What do you want, woman!’

Mam must have made some gesture, for he filled up the doorway there, came out to us. His face as he stepped into the room? He knew. He had known all along.

He saw me realise, my face between the two faces. ‘Where did you find them?’ he called back down the hall.

Mam gave no answer but a pointed clink of her spoon in her bowl.

‘Where did she find you?’ he said to Nase.

‘Cave Cove,’ he said.

‘Anyone see you, coming here?’

Naseby shook his head.

Dad would have said more, if I’d not been there. Instead, he started back along the hall, turned to make some reassuring sign to Nase, saw me again and was gone into the kitchen. Leaning on a chair-back, his shoulders around his ears, he spoke a word to Mam.

‘No,’ she said.

He spoke louder. ‘There’s still a way. Nobody saw you, Nase says —’

‘Sophie must be told,’ Mam said. ‘And I don’t care who else. I really don’t, Odge. It’s time Naseby faced his follies. And time you admitted his uselessness.’

I realised I did not want to leave the front room, which was full of the seal-girl’s wonderful wild smell. It was as if the whole ocean had pooled in here, fish and saltwater, weed and whale, sea-birds slicing through the fresh air above. Could a
girl
fall under a seal-girl’s spell? A little knifing of fear cut me free and I forced myself up the hall to the kitchen doorway, to the comforting sight of Mam eating supper, perhaps tireder-looking than usual, but to all other appearances living through an ordinary evening.

Dad twisted in his chair to look over his shoulder. ‘Go to
bed
,’ he said, as if it were the last straw for him to see me.

Mam glanced at me unperturbed. ‘She may as well hear; they may as well
all
know. Wake up your sister, Bet. Get the boys out.’

‘Don’t you
dare
,’ snapped Dad.

‘And then go out in the street and bellow it about town. Tell all creation.’

Dad’s shoulders sank and he shook his head and turned back to deal with her. While they looked hatred at each other I slid forward into the kitchen, and peered back along the hall to see if Nase would bring his girl through.

But no. I had never seen two people so close-wound together; certainly I’d never seen Nase hold to Sophie so.

‘Look,’ said Dad to Mam behind me, as if he were bringing a whole new complexion of sensibleness to the conversation. ‘Look, he
knows
he’s done wrong, the lad — you’ve only to look at him. She can be gone by morning, and all this over, his lesson learned.’

‘And Sophie never know,’ said Mam in a dead voice.

‘And Sophie never know!’ he said, as if that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?

‘Just you, and I, and Nase, and Bet there know.’

‘Just us! And we would never tell —’

‘And Nase when you fill him with kickwater, and his whole soul falls out his mouth onto the table — who would know then? Who would be standing by?’

‘That need not happen, Nance. I’m telling you, he knows the enormity of it — ’

‘And
this
one?’ She nodded at me. ‘When all the girls are sharing secrets and she has this juicy one to share? Who’ll be there? What other little gabmouths?’ I was insulted, but she was right — she knew us girls and what went on among us.

‘Then tell her not to, Nance. Impress upon her. I’m telling you, none of this need happen!’

‘Well, I’m not sitting twitching the rest of my days, hoping it won’t, are you? Oh, you are, I can tell, you fool.’

‘What are you saying? That we bring Sophie down here to see?’

‘Did I say that?’

‘Should we troop up there, then — is that what you want? Him and her and — I don’t know, all of us? You want Geedre and the lads to come too?’

‘Nor that, did I say. All I said is, Sophie must be told. I don’t care how you go about it, but I’ll not have this hidden. That’s my part played. Sort it out yourselves from here.’ And her spoon moved in the broth, rang again against the bowl.

Dizzy from the scent of the seal-girl, I went and leaned in the mouth of the hall. I closed my eyes and they all melted into the sea-smell: Geedre flat as a sleeping fish on the other side of that wall; Dad and Mam either side of the table, which was like a slab of rock or the side of a sunken ship; Nase and his girl there like two twined strands of sea-ribbon, tilted in the flow. I opened my eyes before I should drown, and there was the house again, walls and air, the tintype hanging there of Great-Grandmother Winch, in her baskety chair, just as cross as ever.

Now Dad almost spat. ‘You sit there so
smug
.’ I had never heard that thickness in his voice. Fright blossomed up my spine. Would he strike Mam? I had heard of dads who did hit mams. I turned in the doorway so as I should be ready to run forward and grab him if he tried.

‘Nothing smug about me,’ said Mam calmly. ‘Do you think
that
pleases me?’ She tore bread, ate a piece.

‘Stuffing your face,’ said Dad.

‘I was hungry,’ she said around the bread, as if she didn’t notice how far she had pushed his temper. ‘I was hungry
before
I set out.’

‘You don’t know everything,’ he said quietly.

‘Did I say I did?’

‘You acted like it. You always do. You think you are so sharp? You think we’re fools, me and Nase, that can hide nothing from you?’

‘Well, Nase has done a poor job, certainly.’ She was not afraid at all. Perhaps she did not
care
if she goaded him to hitting her?

Dad growled; after a moment I heard the words in it: ‘You would shame our son, would you?’ His voice was squashed from him hunching over at Mam.

She did not lean or shrink from him. ‘He has shamed
himself
, in my book.’

‘And would you shame me the same?’ He brought his palms to the tabletop, his shoulders up around his ears again.

She gave a little laugh. He had unsettled her. A short silence passed. ‘If you
did
the same as him, you would shame
yourself,
the same.’