Sea Hearts (24 page)

There’s something about those Rollrock women, isn’t there?
I saw the girl’s narrow eyes, her hair-wires glowing around her head. Suddenly, sharply, I wished I were among
those
Rollrock women
; I was sick of this adventure. I wished I was tiny again, and curled in Mam’s lap with her singing buzzing and burring around me in the quiet room, Dad gone to fish or to Wholeman’s.

Trudle looked out the window all across the mainland countryside. She did not seem to feel the need to talk to us; indeed, she might have been travelling quite alone, for all the notice she took of us. When we reached the wharf she boarded the boat ahead of us as if she owned it, and she stayed upright and cheerful-looking all across the Strait.

As soon as we had disembarked at Rollrock my dad sent me up home. Mister Fisher gave me a lemon for my mam, and I dug my fingernail into the rind and sniffed lemon all the way up the town, to clear out the Trudle-smell.

From what I later gathered by overhearing, Trudle was given over to Misskaella just as promised and no fussing. And after that the two of them went about a pair, like a flour- and a tea-caddy. They both wore witch- dresses, tight to their arms and waists, then springing out like flower-bells, nearly to the ground — cages and flowers, as I had seen on the women in Knocknee and Cordlin, very
presenting
of themselves. The one’s hair was dirty orange in the sunlight, the other’s mostly frost, only a few reddish stains in it to hint at what it had been. And Misskaella kept her thinning hair short, while Trudle grew hers, making the point that she alone had such colour, and could bear about such quantities of it.

Misskaella never was polite, never greeted you even if she met your eye, and Trudle learned the same ways fast, or at least towards mams and children. For men she would raise what might have been called a smile if it had not been so sly and ambiguous. She enjoyed teasing our men, anyone could see. They would rather have not seen her, but she would keep planting herself in their way and greeting them. ‘Mister Paige,’ she would say, but it would come out
Pay-eeshsh,
too lingering, and Paige would seem to dodge and weave without taking a step in any direction, would seem to bow and touch his cap-brim without taking his hands from his pockets.

But mostly Trudle followed her mistress about the town and country around. We had been frightened enough of Misskaella on her own; now there were two of them, the small caddy tripping after the big one, taking on and amplifying the old witch’s herbaceous, privy-aceous smell. Two bells on feet, they clanged fear into our spines; two ragged flower shadows, they crept along the sky on Watch-Out Hill. Or they would be on the south mole, Misskaella peering out to sea or up to town, Trudle bent bottom-up collecting fish-scales for their magics. Or the two of them would be horrors together on the field roads, glowering ahead, pretending not to see us boys as we hugged the wall opposite, greeting them feebly as they passed us by.

Come a fine day, the mams would go down together to wash their crying-blankets in the sea. They would sit about on the rocks at the start of the south mole, with their feet hooked in the knitted seaweed. The water would rush in, and swell up and fizz in the blankets, and rush away again. They were always happy then, and we boys liked to be among them, clambering about at our own play while they talked, mixing their languages to make each other laugh
.
They sat so solid, and watched the crowding sea so attentively, you could imagine them staying like sea-rocks there, all night even, searching the black waves as the water and knitted weed bobbed and sucked around them.

Misskaella would stump up and down along the mole, Trudle would skip there, both women with bunches of seaweed in their belts like strange sideways tails. The mams, each moving her blanket slowly across her knees to examine the weave and wear of it, ignored them except to call out for a length of weed now and then. Some boys were always among the mole-rocks playing; these would take the lengths of weed from witch to mam, and the mams would pinch their cheeks or kiss their heads for their trouble.

It was a fine sunny morning, then, early, and the mams had ooched and ouched over the stones in their bare feet and flung their blankets wide onto the water and now were settling on the rocks around, when what should come in at the pier uncommonly early but the Cordlin boat, and what should fall off it but some Cordlin people, picnic people, baskets with them and the ladies with parasols, and the gentlemen with gentlemen-type hats on and boots that shone like mirrors.

Straight away the ladies walked across from the pier and along to the south mole. There was not much of a breeze, and their voices were as clear to us as if we shared a room:
Are these them, then? Are these the…creatures? The
seal-ladies?

Why, I believe they are. What are they about, do you suppose?

Quite clearly washing of some kind. Washing…

Yes, washing
what
, exactly, Davina?

Well, let us go closer and see.

The mams’ talk had quieted; they lifted their faces curiously to the visitors. I sat among the mole-boulders, so that the Cordlin ladies walking the path were a little above me. Such complicated clothing they wore! And all their bright hairs, brown and gold as well as red like some of us boys’, were so fancily packaged and structured on their heads! I followed their gazes to our mams below, the crying-blankets floating all about them, their faces not composed at all the way the town ladies’ were. They held their entire selves out, all their thoughts and feelings, as if on a platter for the ladies to take as they would. They did not seem to realise that the ladies might laugh, or not understand. The mams held to their blankets, some still stroking the weave as if examining it, even though their eyes were not attentive to the task. The wavelets rippled the wet blankets and made them twinkle in the sun. Some of the mams’ bare shins showed, dappled by the sun, greened and shortened by the water.

A silence fell among the Cordlin ladies too. Misskaella and Trudle stood far off at the mole-end; if Misskaella could have hopped into the sea and swum away I’m sure she would have. All us boys glanced at each other, some of us making faces, some just waiting.

Finally one of the ladies, an older one with pink clouds powdered onto her cheeks, came to the edge of the mole. ‘What is it you are washing there, my good woman?’ she said in a clear, commanding way to the closest mam, Bessie O’Day.

‘Our blankets,’ Bessie said, her voice so plain after theirs that I was embarrassed for her. ‘And we are not washing them,’ she went on, ‘but soaking them. And mending.’ She waved towards the witches; Misskaella folded her arms and turned away with a flick of her weed-tail.

‘What kind of blankets are these?’ cried the pink-cheeked lady. ‘I have never seen their like.’

Bessie began, but her older boy Sumner jumped up among the mole-rocks. ‘No, Mam,’ he said. ‘No, Mam. There’s no need to say.’ He cast a look over his shoulder at the Cordlin woman, then explained up to them: ‘They have a special use, in the homes here. But it is private.’

Private.
I did not know that word, but immediately I grasped its meaning as a warning to the ladies.

The pink-cheeked lady eyed the blankets in the water. ‘What are they made of, though? Can you tell me that?’ She sent a look around her friends that seemed to ask,
Who do they think they are, having private things?
The friends tittered.

‘Seaweed,’ said Sumner.

‘Seaweed!’ exclaimed another woman. ‘How ingenious. This is a craft that they bring from the sea?’

‘Hush, Elgin!’ said one of them. ‘Whoever heard of seals
weaving
?’

Sumner pointed at Misskaella. ‘She makes them. She knits them. Our dads buy them off her.’

‘Don’t frighten them away!’ called a man’s voice. All heads turned to watch him hurry along the sea-front, along the mole, carrying a box on a stick — or several sticks, it was, bound together. He walked nearly to the Cordlin ladies, set his stick-ends down and surveyed the mams and blankets, then lifted the sticks again and hurried farther along the mole. ‘Here is better. There is a subtler light, a more artistic composition.’ And he pulled the sticks apart to make a stand for the box-thing. It had a circle on the front, like a flat black eye.

‘Oh, no,’ said Sumner, but softly, as if he knew he had no power over this bustling person from Cordlin. He turned to glance up to Wholeman’s, where some of the dads were, all unsuspecting because the boat had come in so early; he sought out someone at Fisher’s, but all the men there were in conversation with the
Fey’s
captain, their backs to us.

The man unfastened the box, and pulled out the front of it, folded like a concertina, shook out a black cloth over the box and legs. I could not take my eyes from him, he was so energetic and mysterious. What might he do next?

But then Misskaella whistled.

‘Oh, what is that?’ said the ladies.

‘What? They’re not done,’ said Os Cawdron down from me. ‘They’re hardly even begun.’

But Misskaella had not whistled to signal the end of the washing. The dads on the wharf turned. They saw the box-man and came running. Up at Wholeman’s men pushed out the door and along the rail, and two of them spilled under it and began to run down.

‘Oh dear, Mister Thornly,’ said one of the ladies, ‘I think they don’t want you taking photographs of their women.’

Ah, photographs — Mister Paste up at the school had told us about those. This, then, was a camera — a box for keeping light out, with an eye for letting light in.

‘Now, excuse me, sir,’ called out Mister Bannister, rounding off the sea-front onto the mole. ‘We’ll have none of that.’

The camera-man straightened from his fiddling with the box, and watched our menfolk hurry at him. They stopped a few yards away, and the townswomen slightly clustered and clutched together at the sight. Beside these Cordlin clothes, our fathers’ dress looked dark and not quite clean; beside their small smooth faces, our dads’ were crumpled, darkened also. But that is not dirt, I protested to myself; that is sun and wind and weather — and whisky, for a couple of them, I admitted.

The man stood hands on hips. ‘But I came here specifically to make a photographic record.’

‘And I’m sure we’re very happy for you to do that,’ said Bannister, smoothing down the air while some of the men bristled behind him. ‘But we weren’t expecting you so early, and the women were planning to have this blanket-work done before the boat came in. They’re not respectable, and we don’t want you taking unrespectable pictures back to mainland, do we?’

‘We certainly don’t,’ said Bern O’Day crisply, and a touch threateningly.

‘And showing them about,’ said Bannister. ‘And Cordlin people thinking we let our wives get about like that, all barelegged.’

The mams eyed each other’s water-thickened shins, exchanged baffled looks.

‘What is wrong with legs?’ muttered Oswald, bending his head to look at his own. The sunshine fizzed in the red bristles on the back of his head.

‘We don’t wish to offend, I’m sure,’ said the pink-cheeked lady loudly. ‘But Mister Thornly here is both an anthropologist and an artist. I think you can rest easy that he will make no inappropriate use of his pictures.’

‘Can we now?’ said Corbell snakily, back in the crowd.

‘I’m sure we can,’ said Bannister, smoothing the air again.

‘It is his project,’ the lady trumpeted on, giving a little flick of her parasol as if to say she would not allow herself, or any of her people there, to be trifled with, ‘to document all the customs and habits of the people of these isles, for posterity.’

‘I think your wives are beautiful!’ said the camera-man. How white he looked after our dads, like a man made of china — and how could he think they wanted to hear such a thing from his mouth? Misskaella was walking slowly towards us from the mole-end; Trudle danced along behind her as if bored. Everything was so unusual, I did not think it improbable that Misskaella would pick up the man, or his photographic camera, and smash one or the other of them on the rocks.

‘And while they are engaged in this traditional…’ The man looked at the blankets properly for the first time. ‘What is it, exactly?’

The younger lady said very distinctly and flatly, ‘They are soaking and mending their private blankets.’ I heard the tiniest snort from the lady next to her, and another of the younger ladies turned my way to cover her laughter, saw me looking and brought her parasol down over her face, where it shook a little. Very suddenly I wanted to snatch and throw that parasol, or poke her with its sharp point, or wallop her head free of its little ornamental hat.

‘Private blankets?’ said the camera-man as if all the wind had gone out of him. ‘Well, then, I suppose…’

‘Oh, but I’m sure this has never been recorded before!’ cried one of the young ladies, from sheer mischief — just look at her swaying there, her wide eyes.

‘Of course not, Georgette,’ said Missus Pink-Cheeks, putting a heavy hand on Georgette’s arm. ‘Because it is
private.’