Sea Hearts (18 page)

But she kept her hands in her lap and only watched me. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘Rollrock is no place for me without your dad. And no place for any young man who has a choice about it. You remember your Aunty Ames, and your grandmother, that visited from Cordlin?’

‘A long time ago.’ I sat over the plate I had prepared myself, wanting to begin on it.

‘We will go and be with them, I think,’ she said. ‘I am sure they will have us.’

I stared. Her words, each one small and sensible in itself, would not come together except to mean one thing, and that seemed outrageous, impossible to me, given the shape of our lives to this point. ‘We would go to Cordlin? You and me? And be mainlanders?’

She smiled at how dazzled I was. ‘It will be an opportunity for you, Dominic. Perhaps you can become something other than a fisherman. Not that your dad was not quite happy on the sea, but who knows what awaits his son?’

I pushed her teacup a little closer to her. ‘While it is hot,’ I said, to bring us both back to the present, to this meal, in case we had already dreamed more than we could ever hope for. In another part of my mind I was thinking, Of course, of course. How
right
it will feel, with everyone red, Mam not mismatching any more! This at least was a pleasure I could imagine; the rest was too enormous, too out of my experience, for my mind to regard with more than blank surprise and excitement.

‘I will write to them tonight,’ she said. ‘It can go on tomorrow’s boat. We will wait to hear from Aunty Ames before we make any plans. I’ve no reason to doubt she will take us in, but it’s best not to court disappointment.’

She picked up her tea and took her first sip, as if the action did not weary her in the least.

After Rollrock, Cordlin town was an enormous whirling fairground of a place, full of strangers and strange objects and animals, machines and habits. I grew up there, and up, and up, into a gawkish boy, and then I filled out and was a young man. I made my mam proud, as she lay in the last of her several illnesses, by getting myself a job at the market; I wore a white apron down to my ankles and pushed a trolley back and forth all day, loading up crates of vegetables and fruit, buckets of flowers, boxes of fish layered with ice. I was happy enough there, though part of me knew that my Potshead fellows would think little of any living not made on the sea. I had some money and some mates, and once I put on flesh and muscle I found that girls quite liked me.

By that time I had just about forgotten the day Nick Kimes’s wife had walked past us boys on the Crescent road. No, it was the girls right here in Cordlin who had my attention, and after one or two small heartbreaks I found myself Kitty Flaming, who worked in the market office over the books, with whom I was comfortable right from our first conversation at the market employees’ picnic, and with whom I settled to regular walking-out, and dancing, and picture-shows, and the other kinds of entertainments that young couples get up to about a port town like Cordlin.

I was very pleased to have Kitty as my sweetheart. Mam and Gran and Aunty Ames loved her, and she was a fine-looking, proud girl who knew exactly how to dress and behave for any occasion and any group of people, whether they were above or below her in station or exactly matched. She’d a straight eye and a good laugh and such energy, she fair whisked you up and carried you along with her, whatever place or project she was set on. She swept me towards the altar without ever once mentioning it; she let everyone else do the talking. ‘When are you going to marry that lovely girl?’ they said to me. ‘She’ll not wait forever, you know.’ More and more often they said it, as a year went on, and then another year.

We strolled by the quayside, the sunshine softening towards autumn. We’d just met and parted from Jeannie Grace, who had told us of her brand-new engagement to my friend Thomas Parsnall.
It’s hardly news to anyone,
Jeannie had said,
and yet everyone seems surprised, and
takes pleasure in it, and looks at you properly, as if they had
never seen you before.

Now I said to Kitty, ‘People say
we
should be married, you and I.’

‘To each other, you mean?’ she said with a wicked smile.

‘Of
course
to each other.’

‘Hm,’ she said. ‘Which people are these, who say this?’

‘Let me see — Aunty Ames, Tom Geoghan and Mister Bryce at work. Windy Nuttall, your Uncle Crowther. Everyone.’

‘Really. How funny of them. I dare say marriage is not on your mind at all. I hope you tell them fair and square what to do with their opinions?’ Her face was raised to meet the breeze, a look on it as if she never wanted to do more than enjoy that freshness on her skin.

I was full of doubt, in an instant. I walked along beside her, listening to her words again in my head. ‘Do you not want to marry me, then?’ I said eventually.

‘Who’s asking
me
?’ she said, pretending astonishment. ‘Isn’t it up to you and those
people
to decide?’

I took her hand and walked close beside her. ‘Come, Kitty, don’t fool with me now. Will you marry me or no?’

She shrugged, looked away towards the Heads. ‘I probably will,’ drifted back over her shoulder. I was about to throw away her hand and stamp off, when, ‘Don’t you think?’ she added. And she turned and looked at me, sweet and sly, and into her kiss, a quick one because we were in public, she put all that she was not admitting in her words: surprise and excitement and a little terror.

We walked on, and everything was different, just as Jeannie had said — outlined in gold, things were, in the late sunshine, funnel-and mast-shadows crisply black on the sunlit storehouse walls. Every gull flew in a more purposeful arc, or arranged its folded wings more importantly; every stone and plank went towards making a different stage of life from the one that had passed on from us, moments before. ‘This is the day you tell your grand-children about,’ I said, and Kitty squeezed my hand.

We reached Cobalt’s store and turned back. ‘One thing,’ Kitty said. Again she looked away from me. Between the Heads, the clouds hung puffy, gleamed golden. ‘Your house on Rollrock.’

‘You want to live on
Rollrock
?’

‘I most certainly do
not
,’ she said. ‘I want you to rid yourself of that house. It gives me the shudders just to think of it there.’

‘Why, ever? I’ve not been back in years!’

‘Still, the house is there, and it’s a place for you, among those men and their …what they’ve married. I never want to go there, and I never want you to think that you can go. Go
back
, you know, and belong.’

‘I’ve never for a minute!’

‘I know you’ve not,’ she said a little gentler. ‘But that’s not to say you never would, while you had that house. Will you sell it, please, Dominic? To settle my mind?’

‘Why on earth would you be afraid —

’ But she
was
afraid. She was not sweet and sly now; she was all grave attention to me. ‘It’s the one thing I worry about with you, your connection to that place. Will you sever it, for me? For our
sons
, should we have any?’

I saw then how far she had taken this in her mind, while outwardly she had seemed carefree, accepting of everything about me. I saw, in her thoughtful, firmly held face, that she was prepared to forgo me, if I chose not to do as she asked, it mattered so much to her.

I took both her hands. ‘Gladly,’ I said. ‘It means nothing to me, that mad isle. I’ll sell the house tomorrow, and buy you a ring with the money.’

She examined my eyes, saw how serious I was behind my smile, and smiled back with relief.

Well, it turned out not to be so straightforward, of course. No one in Cordlin wanted a Rollrock house. Men laughed, and women looked at me sideways at the very suggestion.

‘Twenty years ago, maybe,’ said Aunty Ames, ‘you might have sold it. But no one wants to take their family there while all the wives are those sea-madams.’

‘I should say,’ said my employer Mister Bryce, ‘that your only hope would be to go to the isle yourself, and see if there is any young man about to make a marriage, who could use it.’

‘I could write to Fisher, I suppose,’ I said to Kitty, ‘and have him ask about.’

‘Yes, do that,’ she said, and moved on to talking of the arrangements for our betrothal supper.

I sat to write that letter with hardly a thought, and I wrote swiftly, laying out my greetings to Neepny Fisher, who I’d heard had taken over the store from his father Jodrell, and to his wife and family, and moving briskly on to frame my request. It was only as I watched the words ‘and all its contents’ fall out of my pen onto the page that I felt a tremor of doubt. I sat there and stared at them awhile, and then I wrote on, to the end of the page and the end of the matter.

I put the letter in the post next day, and when I had finished work I went by the market’s office. ‘Wife-to-be?’ I said in the door.

Kitty looked up from her calculations and smiled with happy surprise, and blushed a little.

‘A quick word?’ I said. ‘I’ll not disturb you long.’

She pulled up another chair for me to perch on near to her.

‘I have sent the letter to Fisher.’

The happiness vanished from her face, and she was all business. ‘Good. How soon will you hear back, do you think?’

‘Maybe Tuesday night’s boat? I’m not sure. Neepny may not be as ready to do a favour as his dad was. But I wanted to ask you. There are two chairs in that house, armchairs, my mam’s and my dad’s. I remember we covered them with sheets as we left. It’s not that they are valuable, and they’re probably not improved from years of sitting there unused, through winters and summers.’

‘Can you have Fisher send them, perhaps? Crate them up and put them on the boat?’

‘I thought of that. And then I thought, what a clumsy lad Neepny used to be, and a grubby one, and would I want him manhandling them? And I thought, perhaps I should look the place over — the old house — for anything else we could use in our married life? And also, my dad’s grave has gone untended all these years. I should like to visit, I think, just to tie off these ends in my mind, do you see? Also, if I go and look Neepny in the eye, he may take better care on the sale, in getting me my price. I would only go a day or two, and then I would be finished with the place forever. And we would have those armchairs, brought across carefully. I don’t even know if we could use them, but to have them in our home, Mam’s and Dad’s side by side … I think I would like that.’

I had bent farther and farther forward in my seat, so that now I must look up to see Kitty’s face. She regarded me most soberly awhile. ‘Two days,’ she said. ‘Two chairs. Yes,’ she said. ‘It is nice to have some keepsakes.’ She examined her lap, turning the folds of her skirt there and smoothing them. She looked up; she nodded. I loved her in that moment. I saw how easily our married life would run, how agreeably. ‘When would you go?’

‘Wednesday morning is the next boat. Mister Bryce would give me the time off, I’m sure. It is his suggestion, this arrangement, after all.’

‘Saturday is our supper. Can you be done and back by then?’

‘Oh, I should wait until next week, then, so as to help you here with the supper!’

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Get it over and done.’ And she flashed me a cautious smile.

On Tuesday at the market I bought some mainland flowers to put on Dad’s grave, kinds never seen on Rollrock, I was sure; they would have bemused him, but that was partly the point of them, to show him how far I had moved on from the isle, from our little lives there.

On Wednesday morning, I and my flowers boarded the
Fleet Fey
, and I sat before the wheelhouse as we chugged across the harbour, and out between the Heads top-gilded by the rising sun. As the land fell away behind, the breadth and depth and mystery of the ocean struck me as it had not for a long while, and the tininess upon it of people, and people’s crafts. The waters heaved and rolled and sank beneath me, and I remembered how, when small, I had regarded the sea as a single vast beast, many of its moods and intentions hostile towards us on our little island, or in our little boats.

I remembered our boat-ride, Mam’s and mine, from Rollrock to Cordlin, as a great sea-voyage, at least a day long, so it surprised, even alarmed me how soon the island rose from the sea, how quickly Potshead spotted and sprouted on the slopes, and then grew thick in the cleft of them as we rocked around the western headlands. I hardly felt ready. But what was I afraid of? I was a Cordlin man now. I would transact the business of my house and the chairs and then be gone again.

The town seemed smaller and poorer than I remembered it, more beaten into the hill by the weather. Clancy Curse detached himself from Fisher’s wall with exactly the same idle-seeming movements as I remembered from my childhood, and caught the ropes and wound them about the bollards in the old familiar way. He was quite a small man — they were all shortish, the men who met the boat, though I remembered them as giants, their heads among the clouds, full of wisdom and weather and long-gotten experience. But no, they were little nuggety fellows, and some of them bow-legged, their skin gone to leather from years of wind and cold aboard the boats.