Sea Hearts (17 page)

With a whisk of his own coat and a bundling of Mam’s he was gone. He passed the window, downhill, in the cold grey afternoon.

I was too hot now. I climbed into Dad’s chair, and the sting when I sat back against my heated shirt and jumper made me gasp. I sat and waited and listened for the two of them outside. The house around me was one large comfort in the middle of the rain.

When they came back, I peered around under the chair’s wing to watch them fuss and exclaim at the door. Dad took Mam’s milk-bottle that she had bought, and she shrugged off her coat, and exchanged coat for bottle. The raindrops fell from both their hems to the rug there, and her hair straggled crimson on her cheeks. They were laughing about her having to be rescued, and how quickly and hard the rain had come on. ‘Specially to wet
me
, you would have thought, Dominic! See how it’s stopping, now that I’m home and safe in the dry?’

She carried the milk away to the kitchen, and Dad shook out and hung up their coats. I slid from his chair as he crossed back to the fire. I sat in Mam’s chair, which was smaller and of smoother cloth, with flowers. He resettled himself, and I waited for him to say one of the things he always said,
Two old codgers by the fire, then,
maybe, or
Oh, it’s a wild night to be out in,
which he would say whether it stormed or sat perfectly fine outside.

But he sat silent a while, searching for his thoughts in the fire and smiling on them. Then he saw me watching, and his smile grew serious.

‘When it comes to marrying, go to the mainland,’ he said. ‘Get yourself a Cordlin woman, like your mother. That’s the proper kind of wife for men like us.’

Men like us
? Could he not see my legs stuck out here, the ankles only just off the seat? Could he not see how I had to lift my elbows almost level with my shoulders to rest them on the chair-arms? Still, I was proud that he would call me a man in spite of these, would regard me as like himself; he charmed me with the idea of the two of us fronting up at life together in his mind.

I was so pleased and preoccupied with
men like us
that I let the rest of what he said stay mysterious. It would never come to marrying, for me; I would always be a boy, running and fishing and fighting and mucking about in coracles. I would never want more than that.

‘Harvey Newsom is a turnip,’ said Neville Trumbell.

We were up on Whistle Top, with the whole town below us, and no one coming up the path. There was a springish wind about — maybe its warmth, and grassiness, and sea-salt, had made so much talk fountain out of me.

‘Everyone knows,’ Neville went on. ‘Newsoms will say anything to hurt you. They’ve all got that nastiness. Their dad was always picking fights up at Wholeman’s — you know that. That’s why he has to drink at his home.’

‘It’s true.’ I admired how Neville could dismiss Harvey’s words, how he did not let them stay and burn in him. They had never stopped burning in me since Harvey had said them.

‘Everyone knows, too, about the mams. All the mams were like your mam once, and like our dads. They were of a piece, women and men the same.’

‘They were?’ I could not imagine such a thing.

‘Oh yes. Didn’t your dad tell you? Or your mam, more likely? Course, she wasn’t here then; your dad went to mainland and fetched her in. But she was from an old Rollrock family — Trenchers, they were; she knew what she was coming to. Back in our dads’ times, it was, and our granddads’, some of us. None of these other mams were about then. They were in the sea, being their sea-selves.’

I stared down upon the rumpled little jigsaw that was Potshead, with Meehan’s cherry tree coming into blossom in the nearest yard. I did know that, about the mams; I had heard and known about it all my life, that older world, that angrier. But somehow I had never properly listened and thought and put it together.

‘Where did they go, then, the red ones?’ I asked. ‘What happened to them?’

‘Oh, they left,’ said Neville. ‘All of them, of their own accord, in a great temper.’

‘What did they have to be angry about?’

‘Nothing,’ said Neville. ‘They were just like that, says my dad. You’d only to give them
Good morning
and they’d go off at you like a cracked hen. They hated everything and everybody. We’re well rid of them, he says.’

‘Hmph,’ I said. ‘But my mam is not like that.’

‘I know.’ His face was clenched to hold a grass stalk in his lips the way some old men hold their pipe. ‘I said that to him once.
Dominic’s mam is peaceable enough,
I said.
But look to Misskaella,
he said.
You cannot get much
fierier or fiercer than that.
He said your mam must not be full red-woman. She must have seal in her somewhere, he reckons.’

‘You think?’

‘I don’t think, no. Or why would your dad have gone all that way to get her, if he didn’t want her pure? That was the whole point.’

I nodded, though I had no idea. I’d no idea about any of this, and I did not like to think of my mam and dad being passed about as ordinary Potshead gossip and legend.

‘Besides.’ Neville’s whole face changed, grinning, becoming boy again. ‘I like your mam’s arse. She makes a change, to walk along behind, the way she flubbles.’

I sprang at him with my fists, and he parried me laughing, and that was the end of that conversation.

I was rising twelve when my dad died, one dark winter. He took the heart out of us, Mam and me, for a good while there; we washed and buried him, and then we sat about. Though the island thawed and seeped around us, still we stayed frozen, she and I. We could not be apart, each alone with this changed arrangement of things; we could not be together, knowing what we had lost with Dad.

People who were not Malletts, their lives went on around us, and they had never looked more peculiar to me than they did from within the cold shell of our mourning. The rude red men strode about, the dark silk-haired women with their soft smiles and their sea-singing moved vaguely about the town, and all of them seemed foreign, as did the boys, my fellows, who were mixtures of their mams and dads. Some were completely red after their fathers, and others had hair that fell flat, or that drink-of-water build of their mother, or her big dark eyes, or something of her floating manner. Whether red or black, they seemed quite distinct in nature from me, they were so energetic and enterprising, they laughed so easily, and brought such passion to anything they talked about.

I was out of doors in my restlessness, in a little crowd of such mixed boys, when Nicholas Kimes brought his new wife up from Crescent Corner. Some of us wanted to watch the actual extraction of her, out of the seal-body, but that crow Misskaella had scowled and cawed at us to be off before she and Kimes went down there, and some lads would not go against her. They held us back from the cliff-top, who might otherwise have spied on the magic over the edge. Brawn Baker had said you could feel the moment if you held yourself attentive enough, so we sat quietly in the grass against the wall and waited for that. Some said they felt something, a prickling of their skin and such, but nothing they claimed could not be sheeted home to the chill of the spring breeze, or the thrill of being here, so near to what was forbidden.

And all of us were surprised alike when Nicholas’s copper curls showed so soon, in the sunlight at the top of the path. He walked slowly, leading his lady. She was learning to balance and to walk as she came. She wore a land-dress, a plain shift, somewhat stiff in its newness. Her hand was locked in Nick’s, and she leaned to him in all her movements. The salt-and-seaweed breeze blew her shining hair, but could only lift strands of it, not the full weight, which fell as far as her thighs. Behind these two the witch struggled up into view like a block of cliff-face come to life, stone-footed and clumsy yet.

As the three of them drew near, only the seal-woman seemed to see us — and then she looked to Nick to explain us, to give her our names. When he did not, but only gazed wondering and wordless back into her beautiful face, she seemed to accept that too, that we were to be nameless for now, a crowd of gawpers to be passed on by. So on they went, as solemn a procession as if they came out of a church, as strange as if they had straggled off a shipwreck.

In my present deadness of heart, it was not so much the seal-woman who impressed me as Nick himself being so enchanted. I wished I could be as distracted as he, as readily taken up with another person. And there was no doubt she was beautiful; they all were, of course, but this one was fresh-risen from the sea, fresh-peeled into white wonderfulness. My skin goose-fleshed at the sight of her, at the knowledge that magic had brought her. I could see a day when I might want a woman as willowy and bewildered as that, with such silken hair and such dark eyes, and such an inclination towards me as this one had towards Nick. The lads either side of me must have been thinking the same thing, the way they joined me in my silence, gazing after Nick and his bride walking, bound fast together and passing into their new life.

Fearsome Misskaella, her wrappings trailing, rocked along stiff-legged behind them, her red and white hair wisping from where she had quickly knotted it up out of the way while she did her magic work. She was the only red-woman on Rollrock besides my own mother. I was not, like these other lads, born of seal-maids. And I was not to marry one, hadn’t Dad said?
Men like us
, he had said, separating me off from these boys. Placing us above them, was he? Or did he feel, as I felt — sitting back so that, beyond Misskaella’s rags, I might see more of the new bride’s cloak of black hair, shivering at the sight of it shining and sliding across itself — that neither he nor I would ever be fine enough for such wives as this, long-limbed and foreign from the sea?

We upped and followed, but timidly, keeping the three leaders always in sight, but never in hearing.

‘How much does it cost you?’ Salmon Cawdron whispered.

‘No one will say,’ said Neville. ‘You must bargain with
her
on the price. All I know is, Jerrolt Ardler took three years gathering the money, and not a drop at Wholeman’s did he take all that time, and still he owed her more besides, after she brought up his Abigail.’

‘It costs you your full life and manhood, says my dad,’ said Howth Marten.

‘Yes, there’s lots of Rollrock men still in debt to Misskaella, with a pack of sons needing food and clothing on top of the price.’

‘Look at her, though!’ We knew by his tone that Salmon was not talking about the witch. ‘She is not
goods,
that you put a price on — a sack of
flour,
a box of
tins
.’

‘Oh, the price is not for
her
,’ said Neville. ‘The price is for Misskaella’s bother. The price is the bringing. The money is about what happens on the land, although the reward comes from the sea.’

That night I made Mam something of a meal, bread and some cheese, a little smoked fish, and while I assembled it I told her what I’d seen, of Nicholas and his new wife and Misskaella going by. She was always quiet since Dad died, but this night as I spoke and served she spread a different silence about herself, and when I noticed the bright sound of my words ringing in the hollows of it I stopped speaking. I poured the tea and brought the cups to the table, pretending not to notice how present she was in the room, how she was more motionless than usual, fixed on me with a watchful seriousness I had not felt from her in a while.

‘Only I had never seen a mam straight from the sea like that,’ I heard myself apologise.

‘Oh, she is not a mam yet,’ said Mam. ‘At least, not on land. Though she may have pups and pups that she’s left behind, living in the water.’

‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘Some of the stories say that, don’t they, how they are torn apart between the two kinds of children?’

‘Stories?’ she said. ‘If only they were but stories.’

I sat and nudged her tea towards her; perhaps I could send her back to quietness with this reminder of all the wearisome tasks ahead of her, the lifting and sipping, the endless chewing, and all the time the absence of Dad at our elbows, the room echoing with his un-uttered remarks, his un-laughed laughs.