Sea Hearts (6 page)

‘She can’t just
take
it,’ said Ann Jelly. ‘She can’t just
eat
it.’

‘Why not?’ Billy hovered, unable to take his eyes off the bun.

‘What’s on out there? Not seals again, is it?’ And Dad was there in the doorway.

‘Here, Dad, whose writing is this?’ Bee snatched the note from Tatty and held it up.

‘“For the little one.”’ He lowered the note, eyed me and the sparkling bun, took up the note again. ‘Someone very old, from that curling writing. And the shakiness. Someone very old and frail.’

‘So someone very old and frail is soft for our Missk?’ said Billy in tones of hilarity, and the others prepared to laugh along.

‘Or wants to
poison
her,’ said Tatty.

‘Give me that,’ said Dad.

I handed him the bun, and licked my fingers of the sticky sweetness they’d picked up from it. He broke the bun apart — silence fell around me at the sight of its soft yellow insides. He sniffed both pieces.

‘I will eat it, to test,’ said Billy. ‘If you want.’

Tatty pushed him off the step. ‘As if he’d rather risk his only
son
, when he has all these
daughters
spare.’

‘Here, eat it, Misskaella.’ Dad handed the bun back.

‘Now?’ cried Billy.

‘She’s full to the brim of porridge!’ said Ann Jelly.

‘Where I can see you,’ said Dad. ‘And all the rest of you. Otherwise you’ll have nagged and badgered it out of her before you reach the end of the street. And it is for her.’ He flapped the note at them. Billy turned away and kicked a cobble.

‘Shouldn’t she be made to share?’ said Lorel longingly.

‘I don’t see why,’ said Dad. ‘Is there anything in the note about sharing?’ He pretended to read it again. ‘Why, I don’t believe there is.’

‘He doesn’t mind losing
you
, Missk,’ said Tatty. ‘As long as the rest of us aren’t poisoned.’

It was a waste to cram the bun, so light and sweet, into my mouth so fast, to gulp it down under all those envious gazes without properly enjoying it. Dad shooed us off as soon as I’d secured the last mouthful. We went silently, me still chewing.

‘Who can it be,’ murmured Billy at my elbow, ‘so old and frail and in love? For the
little
one,’ he added sentimentally. ‘For the
little
one, that I would bounce upon my knee. For the
little
one, who I’d like to put my hand up the skirts of — ’

‘Stop it, Billy,’ said Ann Jelly. ‘It is not Misskaella’s fault some old grandpa’s taken to her.’

‘Or a grand
mam
,’ I said indistinctly, poking stuck bun-scraps from my teeth with a finger. ‘A grandmam could have
made
that bun.’

‘Never,’ said Billy. ‘That’s a mainland bun, that sort. That’s a Cordlin baker bun, that Fisher gets in sometimes.’

I tried to enjoy the last tastes of exotic Cordlin.
Was
it some old man acting fond? Was that better than the bun’s being something to do with the seals, and my attraction for them?

When we came home that afternoon I went straight in to Mam. ‘Can I see that paper,’ I said, ‘that came with the bun this morning? Did Dad show you?’

‘Whatever do you want that for?’ Mam looked up from scrubbing the table.

‘To examine the writing. I never saw it properly. Only Dad and Tat got to see it.’

‘Too late; I have burnt it in the stove. You will have to wait until he favours you again, whoever it was.’ And she went back to scrubbing, hard.

On my birthday, a pair of thin socks, shop-bought socks with roses embroidered on the cuffs, was left on the little snowdrift at the door.

‘Your lover-man has left you a present, Missk!’ Billy carried the socks in high over his head, and deposited them by my porridge-bowl, from where Tatty immediately snatched them up.

‘Oh stop, Billy,’ said Ann Jelly. ‘It’s Ambler’s granny has put them there.’

‘She would have had Ambler bring them,’ said Grassy, ‘as she did before.’

‘Besides, she is dying,’ said Bee. I looked up shocked. ‘Or so I heard,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘Praps she is hoping Missk will come and cure her?’ Billy went noisily to his porridge.

‘She would have
said
, then,’ said Grassy. ‘She would have sent Ambler to ask. How are we to know that, from a pair of socklets with no name on them?’

‘Well, someone wants
something
from our Missk. Who else would these fit? Look at them!’

‘It’s true,’ said Lorel. ‘For all the rest of her roundness, she does come down to tiny feet.’

‘Like a seal.’ Tatty was so taken up in her nastiness, she did not see Mam start towards her from the stove. ‘The way they — ow! I was only
saying
!’ Her spoon dropped and spilled porridge on the table, and she held the back of her head, and glared in outrage at Mam, who ignored her, taking up the pot-ladle. ‘They have those tiny tails, I was going to say, to push their great fat selves along!’ And for
great fat selves
she turned her glare to me, as if
I
had hit her.

‘Ask Fisher who bought the socks,’ said Bee to me across the table, ‘and we will know who is your admirer.’

I would not, and so that afternoon Bee and Lorel went down with the socks to Fisher’s store themselves. They came back disappointed. ‘He says they were not bought from him,’ said Bee. ‘He has never carried that style, he says; perhaps they were bought in Cordlin.’

‘They look quite fresh,’ said Mam, taking the socks from Lorel and examining them. She put them to her face and sniffed. ‘Lavender. And camphor. They have lain for years in some old lady’s camphor-chest.’

‘See?’ said Ann Jelly at Billy, all smug. ‘Ambler’s granny. A last gift before she passed on.’

Finally the socks arrived back at me, everyone having had their fondle and wonder over them. I smoothed them on my knee, imagining them lying on the sunlit snowdrift awaiting me, trying to see the shape of the person who had come along, perhaps before dawn so that no one else would spy them, and left them there and hurried away.

Fisher’s great-grandfather was a little wizened man who sat blanketed by the fire in the store. I idled nearby. It was hard to get him alone, for everyone who came in made chat with him — but if I had chosen a quieter time people would have remarked on my visit.

He farewelled Granger’s dad. His gaze fell to me, but skimmed straight past, for I was of no account to him, some staring girl-child.

There was a good disguising noise of Missus Fisher making hearty talk with Blair Gower at the counter, and for the moment no one else was in the shop. ‘I was wondering,’ I said, standing forward.

The old man set his jaw, his face showing none of the cheerful creases he had presented Mister Granger with. ‘You were wondering? Yes, these are all my own teeth. That is what most children wonder, whose old ones keep their teeths in a jar, or manage without.’

‘I wondered if you knew anything about seals and seal-people.’

Only now, when he went still, did I realise how much all of him had been tinily, busily moving. He ceased blinking; I looked into his staring grey eyes and thought he must have blinked most of the blue from them. In them I saw a Fisher I’d never suspected was there, from the time before he knew everything, when he could still be surprised or frightened. Just for a moment I saw that Fisher, before the granddad-Fisher covered him up, blinking several times to make up for the pause before.

‘I am not
that
old,’ he said.

‘I didn’t mean you were,’ I said. ‘Only, things you may have heard, from
your
old folk.’

‘Oh no,’ he said quickly. ‘I was never privy.’ He pulled his blanket higher on his lap. ‘Missus Fisher!’ he cried out, and I stepped back from him, startled.

‘Yes, Pa?’ came from the counter, and Missus Fisher and Gower glanced across, patience in both their faces.

‘Some tea, if you’d please, when you have the time.’

When Gower had gone out the door and Missus Fisher to the back room, old Fisher shafted me a look and said in a low voice, ‘I know nothing, girl, about any of that, nothing.’

I did not believe him; nobody so old could know
nothing.
I waited in case he should say more, but he ignored me, and then I must stand aside to let Missus Fisher through with the rattling cup and saucer. There was an amount of fussing to do, to set the tea where the old man wanted it, and warn him of its hotness, and be told not to think him a fool, and during this I lost heart, and eased myself away along the rows of sacks and barrels.

Bustling back to her counter, ‘Girl!’ called Missus Fisher. ‘Here.’

She unlocked the money drawer and took out a coin; it shone silver. ‘He says you’re to have a shilling.’

‘A shilling?’ I was so astonished that I all but forgot what a shilling was. The word’s sounds flew out of my mouth, the thing shone in the air. I felt a crashing shame. How would I hide the coin from Billy and my sisters, from Mam and Dad? And now Missus Fisher knew, too. She might not know why her great-grandfather-in-law was being so generous, but she would know that he did not give shillings out to every child who came by. I had marked myself; she knew there was something odd about me — and how many other people would she tell?

I shook my head.

‘He’s quite insistent, my darling,’ she said unfriendlily. ‘Come, take it.’ She shook it. She neither smiled nor frowned, but her eyes worked on me. If I refused or ran away, she would think me even more peculiar. ‘It won’t bite you. There.’ And the thing, all cold except where Missus Fisher’s fingers had held it so long, was in my hand. ‘Now run along and put it somewhere safe.’

Slowly, numbly, I walked up the town through the fine grey rain. What had I done, what had I brought on myself? Back home, I slid the shilling into the toe of one of the Cordlin socks; it was as if I had stolen it, the uncomfortable feelings that clustered around it. I was confused by its very shillingness; farthings and ha’pennies were all I had ever bargained with. Such a quantity of sweets was available to me now, I could hardly do the sums of it, and when I attempted them, I knew that I could never hide so much, or eat it all myself. And if I shared, everyone would ask me how I came by such a feast, and hear about Mister Fisher’s favour, and wonder aloud what kind of nuisance I had been, that he had paid me so handsomely to keep away from him.

I had not been down to Crescent Corner in a while. After Ambler’s visit and the Cordlin bun and the socks and the shilling, I was too conscious of the town’s eyes on me.

But I did miss seeing the seals, however embarrassed I had been by their pursuing me into town. Whenever I took off the bands to wash myself, in among the earth’s up-pouring and the sea’s, I felt the knowledge that the herd was there, an itch upon my mind; this faded in the autumn as they left on their great migration, but the following spring it returned, when they assembled at the Crescent again.

When the sisters suggested walking down to the seal-nursery, I thought I might risk going too. I dawdled along behind them on the field road, careful not to seem too eager. I stood along the cliff-top with them, and closed my lips on the suggestion that we go down to see the seal-babs closer. Grassy uttered it, though, and down we went.