Sea Hearts (33 page)

I could not speak to those begging eyes. I turned side-on in my chair, made as if to take my plate from the table, slumped there, trying to recall. ‘Oh, Dad, who can say? They don’t feel the same things. Or think the way we think up here. Or talk the way — the way we do now.’ I could not look at him; he would be so crestfallen. ‘You want me to say she missed you. But do you want me to lie? I did not see it. But did that mean she
didn’t
grieve after you?’

His face confused my thoughts, and I hunted for something more consoling to tell him. ‘But as for how was she? She was her own self in the sea, that’s all,’ I tried to find a way to explain it. ‘She was not in pain, you know, from her feet, and she could move, so well and so easily, not like under the blankets here, all weighed down — ’

‘She was happy, then,’ he said.

I shook my head. ‘Not even that. But she was freed of … she didn’t have the sadness that she carried around up here. So I suppose, yes, she was happy. But, no — ’

‘It’s all right, Daniel — it’s
good
that she’s free of her misery.’ He smiled me a painful smile. ‘I’d like to be remembered fondly, but I don’t want just a new misery to take over from the old. Otherwise, it would make no sense, what you did.’

‘
Does
it make sense?’ I looked to the window, as if the answer might fly in there.

‘Oh yes, a perfect sense. It needed to be done, and none of us charmed men would ever have done it.’

I shook my head again, not in agreement or otherwise at what he said, but only at how, whosoever’s pain I thought of, it could not be resolved without paining someone else.

‘What of you, then, lad?’ he said softly.

‘Me?’ I seemed, to myself, to be nothing, beside Mam’s being gone.

‘What of you — and the other lads, if you know, if you’ve spoken together? Now that you have been there, lived under that sea, are you always yearning, as your mams were, to go back?’

‘I don’t know.’ I lifted my shoulder to fend him off.

‘Come, now — if you had the chance, if you had the right-sized suit made, and the magic?’

I all but hid behind the table. I put my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands and suffered there awhile. ‘Yes, but only because… Down there, you see, I did not
care
and I did not
feel
. Whereas here — ’ I laid my head on my arms; he would only have been able to see the rounded-over back of me beyond the table now. ‘Here it is
all
feeling and caring, and it makes me so
tired
,’ I said muffledly into my lap.

His chair scraped back. He came around to me, crouched at my head, rubbed my hair. He did not trouble me with more words, only rubbed and scratched my head as you would a cat’s awhile, and then he kissed it, and carried our plates away to the scullery.

When the wind was a particular strength of nor’-easter, Toddy and I would run up towards Windaway Peak. There was a blade of land there, up which funnelled all the airs from Gambrel Wood to Oaten Share, and we stood on it with our toes curled over the rock like eagle-claws, and spread our arms and were held up by the wind. It would push and sluice around us, and overbalance us back down towards the path, or desert us so that we fell forward into a shallow little tumble-room on the south side, and make us laugh. Toddy was a long string-bean like me; neither of us took much holding up. He was not glad to have been brought back to land, for he and his dad never got on, but he had emptied one of Wholeman’s junk-rooms and installed himself there, earning it with the kind of work I used to do.

‘You can almost imagine, can’t you?’ Toddy would cry when we had it right for several moments, when we were balanced in the streaming air.

And you almost could, though the wind was so much lighter and more fickle than tide and swell, and the bodies we put up to it were such different shapes and felt so differently from inside, so raw and rangy. They were right enough that we could convince ourselves that we were carving paths up and down the watermass, that that flap of coat was the touch of some sister, that others, large and small, sang and shifted their formations all around us. We could almost feel the excitement, the bursting of the family at its edges and the huggermuggery in the middle, the jostling, the smooth adjustments and reinings-in and spurts of speed.

We would walk home quietened, blown clean of our sorrows.

‘When it comes summer,’ Toddy said. ‘When we can swim without freezing the nuts off ourselves, we will go down Six-Mile.’

‘Yes, that will be closer.’

‘So much more like it.’

A few paces of silence. The Spine was like the top of the world, with the sky all around us.

‘But never quite, Toddy.’

‘Oh, no. I know that. But perhaps…well, the next best thing. Perhaps close to close enough, what do you think?’

S
o I packed myself and set off for Rollrock Isle. There was no one to tell me not to, any more.

I would not set foot there,
said my late mam in my head,
after what they did to the women. What they did to
your
own Gran.

But that’s all over, said that man. Since years ago.

Oh, not so many years. And no doubt that’s what they
told themselves last time.

But I did not listen to Mam.

An island of nothing but men!
my friend Sally had said.
It sounds wonderful, and frightening! I should come and see
you off at the bus — but I’ve to be at the bakery.

Never mind — I shall see myself off.

You are so brave, Lory. I could never do something like this.

I was not brave, or frightened. I was not even excited as I left Mrs Mickle’s boarding house. The key to the house in Potshead, as black and rough-looking as if it had lain in the sea-bottom for years, scratched at my hand in my coat pocket. Mam’s little case that I had always loved and wanted — it was mine now, and I wished it were hers again — onto the bus it came with me filled with the clothes that I’d taken to Mrs Mickle’s. I put it in the rack and sat below, aware of it like some little cloud above me, blotting out the sun.

Knocknee slid away. I had seen this bus leave before, full of schoolgirls headed for a picnic, or surrounded by well-wishers for a departing honeymoon couple. Today it held only shop-men who had business in Cordlin, and a mam and her daughter who must see the dentist there, and rich Mister Crowly Hunter who popped back and forth all the time to show that he had the time and the money — and me, under my cloud, with my heart inside me like the husk of something.

We rolled out across the countryside. I tried to notice every shape of the land and every object on it; it’s the last time you’ll see this for a while, I told myself. But I could not strongly care. I was only grateful to get away from Knocknee and its four death-beds, its purse-mouthed landlord, its hard-faced carters who had tried to get the advantage of a girl in mourning eager to escape. I had held my ground with all of them, as Gran and Mam always did; I had nothing to be ashamed of. I was leaving the town cleanly; I could come back whenever I wanted.
Don’t burn your bridges,
Gran had said, and I hadn’t. And I had the deed in my case for the bridge
she
had not burned, the house on Rollrock, among those wild, sad men.

The port town reached up out of its valley and drew us down to the water. Why were they called the Heads, those two promontories? They were so much more like arms, shielding the harbour-water from any blow or swell. Down the town we went, which any other day of my life would have been exciting in its strangeness: the fine houses, the costumed people, the little milk-truck there. But the whole world was strange now, without Mam in it, or Dad, or my brother Donald. Even the most familiar things — my own hands, my face in the mirror over the washbowl this morning — struck me afresh. I was glad of new sights, for they shook me a little out of my grief, but I was not the excited girl I had been. Or the frightened one — getting from bus to boat, which would have terrified me a year ago, would now be a small thing, after these three recent deaths, three funerals.

The
Fleet Fey
, the boat was called. Even in my hollowed-out state I had to admit she was a romantic sight. Neat-painted, she moved just slightly at the dockside, seeming to ignore us as she gazed towards the Heads, towards the open sea.

‘Buy your ticket on board, lass,’ said the deckhand steadying the gangplank, so up I went with my case, and sat at the back where I could see all the cabin and out all the windows. With the rumble of the idling engine in my seat and up my back, I watched the mailbags brought on, and some sacks of potatoes. The clouds were breaking up, and the sunshine came and went, now trying to dazzle me with the colour and movements of the waterfront and town, now tiring of the effort and letting all fade to its proper grey again. Here I was, making this journey that I had dreamed of since I was a child, that I had never thought I would have the chance to, or the courage for, and still I felt dull and dogged, just as I had when setting about the rigmarole after Donald died. I knew what to do, all the tasks in their correct order, and grimly I was going about them, preparing myself for each upon the next, for the folk I must deal with and the tricks I ought to be wary of.

The captain came through and shut himself into the wheelhouse. The deckhand pulled up the gangplank, and wound in the wet rope that had been cast off from the shore. The wharf slid away; the other boats glided past at their moorings. There was some relief in that, in the water broadening between me and the mainland with its graves and sorrows.

There were more graves ahead, I knew that. The first chance I had I would visit them: Granddad Odger Winch, and Uncle Naseby, those two scoundrels, objects of Mam’s spitting hatred and Grandmam’s deepest silences.

We passed between the Heads, the rocks piled like messy gateposts either side of us, the swell making the ship restless. The sun came out like a cheer, and the water was the loveliest colour, bright blue-green, and the foam curled like cream on some of the waves. The Heads fell behind, and there was nothing but sky and sea ahead of us, and each one’s weather. The towns and farms and all their fuss and clutter of memories, I was shrugging them off like a heavy cloak, and sailing free.

The deckhand came around and fetched fares. ‘Would you mind telling me when Rollrock comes in sight ahead?’ I asked him.

And I sat there in the thrum of the engine, ploughing forward into my adventure, watching everything too hard to think, until he did. Then I went and stood in the bows.

The island rose from the horizon. It looked like nothing so much as a giant slumped seal itself, the head towards us and the bulk lumping up behind, trailing out northeast to the tail. Its slopes were greened over, its near side all cliffs and cliff pieces, chewed off but not swallowed by the sea. Every cove and cave looked alike inaccessible to me, most treacherous and unwelcoming.

But we did not head for that rough bit of coast as we drew nearer; instead we bore westward and around the head there, and once beyond that I could see where the land lowered itself more gently, making room for a town, a small town only, on the slopes above the two long moles built out from the shore. Above the houses, fieldwalls ran about, looking as if they should topple down the slope. The fields they outlined were smaller and stonier than I was used to seeing around Knocknee.