Sea Hearts (27 page)

I remember lying with my mam in the sun on a rug on the sand at Six-Mile, and the thought coming out my mouth: ‘When I have a wife, I will let her speak seal in our house.’

‘Oh yes?’ she said surprised. ‘Why will you do that, my Daniel?’

‘Because when wives talk seal they are happy, and I want my wife to be happy.’

I lay there pleased with myself for this wish, pleased with my own kindness uttering it to my mam, pleased with my plan for my future self, who would become a kind and admirable man. All was well with that day, the warmth of the sun and my mam and me on our island of blanket, other mams at a distance, other boys running and kicking up the water.

Mam turned towards me, propped her head on her hand. ‘My darling,’ she said softly, ‘if you want your wife to be happy, and to speak the seal-tongue truly, you will not take her as your wife.’

For a moment our conversation ceased to make sense. I frowned up at Mam, hands behind my head still, the little leisurely gentleman.

Then, ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I should leave her as a seal?’

She nodded. ‘Leave her as a seal,’ she almost whispered, as if testing the words in her own mouth.

I laughed at her solemn face with the sky behind it. ‘But who will cook my dinners and do my laundry? Who will sweep my house?’

She poked my middle. ‘Why, you could do all that your own self. You are a good little sweeper, very thorough.’

‘But who will be mam to my boys?’

‘A woman,’ she said. ‘A woman of the land, your own kind. She could give you girls as well, that woman. I hear they are a great comfort, daughters.’

I pitched myself at her, instantly jealous of those daughters she did not have, the comfort they did not bring. ‘
Sons
are a great comfort!’ I clung on and kissed her bossily, kissed away that solemn look and made her laugh at me, pushed all that talk of the future
into
the future where it belonged.

‘It’s true. They’re a great comfort!’ And looking in my urgent face she laughed some more. ‘My son particularly, my Daniel!’

And I was so occupied with obtaining these assurances, and pressing my need for them upon her, that it did not occur to me even to wonder, let alone to ask her, why at all, in the first place, she might require comforting.

I was idling outside Grinny’s place. He was ill in the armchair inside, and we were talking through his cracked- open window. It was the greyest darkest cold day, with lamps lit in most houses though it was barely past midday.

A white ghost went by down the hill, but running harder than any ghost would run — its feet slapped and its breath sobbed. By the time I looked there was only the back of her to see.

‘What!’ said Grinny and pushed the window wider, though his mam had forbidden it.

Her hair spilled down her back like black paint, her poor feet ran, all warped and bunioned from shoe-wearing, their soles grey with dirt.

‘That was Aggie Bannister,’ Grinny said in flat wonder.

‘Aggie Bannister?’ I said stupidly.

She floated away down the town, as pale in the dimness as a falling flare. She had been shut away from us for some time. Aran had hardly come out to play since that day up at Wholeman’s — or Timmy or Cornelius either, any Bannister boy. Bannister himself we’d barely seen since last spring when they’d had to put their girl-bab in the sea. He’d been mourning so hard, it was all he could do to fetch himself to the boats and back.

‘Follow! Go after her!’ said Grinny. ‘Come back and tell me!’ He waved me away and brought down the window, nodding, bright-eyed.

So down I ran, and other boys ran too. There were enough people out, coated and hatted and pinch-faced with cold, to make noise to bring out others — our running left a path of opened doors behind us, a path of
What’s up?
and
Where are you lads off?

I didn’t slow to answer. Aggie ran around Low Corner. I thought she would slip and fall there, and I picked up speed. We slid into the corner ourselves; she had fallen just beyond. Men started towards her to help her, then did not know what to do because she was naked — one began to take off his coat. Their wives had hardly time to cry ‘Aggie! Oh!’ before Aggie blundered up, and ran off again, shaken off course by the fall, nearly smacking into a house-front, like someone’s cow got out, not knowing about towns and how to pass through them.

She steadied and ran off. Some mams went to go after her, but their men stopped them. ‘It’s clear enough where she’s headed,’ said Robert Dunkling, pulling his wife by the hand to the head of Totting Lane. All the others, realising his sense, went too — our little clump of boys poured ahead of them down Totting and Fishhead with windows opening and people crying out above, reached the cross lane and slipped down to the sea-front under the rail of it, staggered out staring to the south where Aggie had not yet appeared.

And then she had, a shining slim streak of person, determined, churning into the beginning rain. Several mams ran for her, never minding their husbands.

‘They’re not fast enough,’ said some man up on the ramp.

‘Aye, she’ll give ’em the slip easily.’

She was already across the front. She saw the mams, decided she would not make for the steps or they would catch her, began to clamber down among the boulders of the south mole.

‘Oh, ho!’

‘She’ll hurt herself in there. She’ll break herself — oh!’ As Aggie slipped and fell among the rocks.

‘But up she is, again. She’s bleeding.’

We boys were down at the sea-rail now, grown-ups hurrying to lean along beside us, the whole town lining up to see. Younger men turned their faces aside, hiding embarrassed grins from each other. Older men watched, composed. The mams held their hands to their fraught faces; they spoke not a word, to the men or to each other, and their eyes didn’t leave Aggie for a moment.

Somehow she had reached the beach. Bloodied at knee and hip and elbow, she went at a limping run out across the stones. Now some men, my dad among them, took it into their heads to start down the stairs and catch her that way, but when she saw them she turned straight for the water, staggering, clumsy, as if she were transforming to seal right there, and might have to heave herself legless and armless the rest of the way.

‘Where’s her man?’ said someone. ‘Is he so gone in his grief he is
letting
her swim away?’

And then Aggie was a naked back and bottom in the middle of a white fan of water. The green-white froth passed over her, streaking and swallowing her blood, pasting her hair flat to her head. ‘So cold!’ moaned a woman behind me, but Aggie embraced the waves, swimming strongly; she was not clumsy there, and the cold did not bother her.

‘She wants to stay in the lee of the mole,’ said Prentice Meehan above me. ‘It’s dirty farther out.’

‘She is not out swimming for her
health
,’ said his wife. ‘She doesn’t want to
stay
anywhere.’

The mams in pursuit were stranded along the south mole, begging, waving their arms. The men had strung themselves out along the shifting brink of the water, trying to see her, seeing and calling out uselessly. I remembered Rab Wholeman that day at the inn, alone in his guilt, us shrinking away as if the very touch of him were poison. Here was a very different thing, everyone forcing forward, crying out help and worry, and still Aggie went, striking out as if none of us were here, labouring away through the cold sea.

‘She would rather drown,’ said Missus Meehan, with a mix of certainty and disbelief, into the little silence that had fallen on us. We could only watch Aggie’s smallness in the edge of the sea, beyond the waves now and crawling forth across the great wind-ploughed field of it, waking the green from its greyness with her splashings, drawing her messy white line out and out.

‘She’ll tire fast in that cold,’ a man whispered.

A howl of the wind turned into the howl of a man — ‘Aggie!’ — and Bannister ran out at the far end of the house-row.

‘He has her coat!’ It flapped around him; it looked as if it had blown against him by accident, and he was trying to fight free.

‘He’s too late wi’ that,’ said Whisky Jock.

Bannister lumbered on, woeful; Aggie was a dot in the water, a white haunch shining for a moment, a white foot splashing, and then nothing, hidden behind the glassy green upshelving of a wave.

Along the mole ran Bannister, quite thrown out of himself and his usual miseries, his mouth wide in his face like a bawling bab’s, his arms reaching. The wind and waves tore up his bellow and threw it at us in shreds, some strange animal’s cry, not a person’s, not a grown man’s.

Right out to the end he got, and still he yearned farther. He made to clamber down the end point.

‘Don’t be daft, man!’ said some man.

‘It’ll sweep him away!’ a woman said dreamily.

The sea jumped up and smacked the mole-end, a great fanfare of spray. Bannister staggered back, soaked. And there he stood a moment, clutching the coat and staring out to where Aggie came and went, came and went, bobbing and struggling now among the wilder waves, that came at her irregularly, and from every direction.

The sun poked a hole in the clouds, sent a bar through the spume and beginning rain, flung down a patch of light on the sea near the mole-end. Bannister threw the coat. It did not fly far, for it was heavy, and the wind was against him. It lumped out into the air and splatted on the water and was gone. Then it was there again, struggling, just as Aggie was, to stay afloat.

Our silence tightened at the rail — the coat and Aggie were far apart, and neither was swimming towards the other. The coat’s edge broke the surface; its whole shadow hung within a big sunlit wave like a hovering hawk. Aggie’s face showed, her mouth, her arm and breast, and then a wave crashed down, folding her into the sea. Even mad with grief, Bannister did not dive in. He stood a little way down from the mole-top, his legs bent and his hands red claws upon his knees, bellowing out to Aggie not to die.

She did not obey him. She lay slumped in the water when next we saw her; only her back showed, the water moving her black hair on it. The sun went away. Some of the mams wept, in their quiet way, not much more than a gasp and a sniff now and then. Men’s and mams’ and boys’ faces alike fixed on Aggie, unspeaking, unblinking.

The sea brought her in between the moles again. Through the grey rain-beginning, through the curling rows of green-grey waters, up and down it brought her, slowly. Mams ushered some of the littler boys away —
Come, Dav. Come, Phillip
. We stood at the rail unable to tear our eyes for more than a moment or two from the dead woman floating in.

‘She looks so calm now,’ whispered a mam. ‘Now she is not fighting.’

‘Free of suffering,’ said another.

‘Which is grand for her,’ some husband rumbled. ‘And for her lads?’ And the awfulness of that hit me. Yes, how could she have been so cruel? How could she be so
sad
, that she could be so cruel?

‘And look at Bannister.’ The man was folded around himself among the mole-rocks — we could see his shaking from here. Several of the mams were making their halting way up towards him, pausing to throw up their arms or embrace each other.

‘If only they could have kept that girl,’ breathed a mam.

‘It’s no good thinking like that,’ said Trotter Trumbell. ‘We’ve all of us given up daughters; that is just the way things are.’

‘It is not as if the girl-babs are
dead
,’ agreed Martin Dashwell.

Some of the mams lowered their heads and pulled their shawls down. Others only faced the sea and Aggie, their sorrow wearier, beyond the freshness of tears. Missus Cawdron saw me looking, and worrying for them; she sent me half a smile, warm and sad, her head tipped to one side.

‘Even with that girl she would have been miserable,’ said Garvis Marten boldly, and we all tightened away from him. ‘It’s their natural set of mind. And it’s only made worse by lads getting in where they shouldn’t, and coming home smelling of — ’

‘Enough, Marten,’ said Trotter sharply. ‘It doesn’t help anyone to belabour that.’

The waves brought Aggie back to almost exactly where she had gone in, and not three yards from where they had thrown up the coat. The men were all over the beach, the stones clacking and scraping under their feet like dogs mouthing bones. The mams broke away from us in pairs and groups along the sea-front; the ones who had run to stop Aggie now met and milled in with them; three women, out at the mole-end, were trying to persuade broken Bannister to come in. Someone had gone for Misskaella, and here she came hurrying along the far beach with one of her blankets in her arms, its corners trailing. Only boys were left along the rail.

‘It is his own fault,’ said James Starr offhandedly, ‘being so miserable about the daughter. Timmy told me, he’d sit to dinner and go to tears and mawk there while they ate around him. That’s no way for a man to behave.’

‘It is
all
their faults,’ said Raditch’s big brother Edward savagely, kicking at a rail-post. ‘Stealing our mams out of the sea in the first place.’

‘Oh, you cannot blame them for that,’ piped up little Thomas Davven beside me. He clutched himself and bowed and bent in the cold wind, without the shelter of the crowd any more. He nodded at Misskaella struggling up the dune onto the sea-front. ‘If you had to choose between women like
her
and our beautiful mams, which would
you
choose?’