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What?
This man from Sye. What does he look like?
She waits. Constance waits for the answer, and the longer she waits, the more she thinks I know what he looks like. She can guess.
Dark, he says, casually.
Skinned?
No – dark-haired. His skin’s pale.
Not old, then?
Late thirties, maybe. Early forties. Hard to tell.
Beard?
He looks up. Constance. It is his warning voice.
She meets his stare. She holds her gaze until he looks away. Perhaps what surprises her is not that she was bold enough to marry, but bold enough to marry him – Ian, whose temper was as known as the Anne-Rosa is. And like the Anne-Rosa, it was mistrusted and whispered of and could rise out of the darkness, slick with hanging weed. She’d been told of it. But Constance was never afraid. Once, just once, in their early days of marriage they had argued about the farm – what had it been? A broken machine? A sheepdog that was not learning? She cannot recall it now and perhaps it does not matter. But Ian had struck the wall. He’d given a single roar and slammed his fist against it so that the wall shook. That had silenced them both – from loud voices to a sudden, incredible hush in which Constance could hear the dust settling onto the floor. Hands on her knees, she examined the plasterwork – broken, powdering. Then she pulled on her shoes and, without a word, she walked down the lane towards the harbour – meaning, absolutely, to catch the ferry and make her way back to the mainland, to the town she grew up in and still missed sometimes. Ian followed, pleading. I’m so sorry … Stay. It never happened twice. On that quayside, Constance turned to her husband and vowed – swore with gritted teeth and her hand to her chest – that she would leave him for good if he ever struck another thing. Anything, Ian – the wall, the dog, a pillow, her. I promise.Do you understand me? Yes, he understood her; Constance always keeps her word. And he has shouted since, and he’s slammed doors, and once, having argued with Nathan, he kicked the rainwater barrel with such power that it ruptured and the rush of water sent the chickens running in the way that chickens do – as if the world is ending. Ian can curse like no-one else she knows. And it is blunt, unimaginative swearing so that she winces. But that’s all he’s done, in twenty-four years. It is all he’ll ever do.
Constance drinks her orange juice.
There is the drip of the kitchen tap.
Someone needs to tell Emmeline, she says, and pads out of the room.
It is the peonies she loves. She has always been told that the island’s weather and its salt and thin soil would not suit them, that peonies could not grow on Parla. But she has grown them. She has tended them, and hoped, and here they are now. They grow in a cluster, facing south. Their pinkness makes her heart fill up, each time. When she walks back along the lane towards Easterly she sees them, and smiles – and it is like coming home to a person, she thinks. It is like being greeted. It is like a hello.
Emmeline kneels beside them. She holds a watering can and wears her sheepskin slippers. Beautiful, she tells them. You are doing very well.
It is one of the small benefits of living on her own: she can grow the flowers she has always longed to. Thirty years ago, any flowers she tried for were crushed by footballs and children’s feet; fifteen years ago, she would have looked out of the window on a Sunday as she cooked the roast dinner for Jack and wished that she could be out in the flowerbeds with a trowel and a bag of manure, rather than sieving the gravy. She called it a woman’s lot, back then. People matter more than flowers, of course. But now she has the time – at last. Foxgloves and hydrangeas. And she loves her peonies.
Emmeline stands, looks out to sea. The unending sea. She grew up in the lighthouse. Her, her parents and Tabitha had lived in one of the three houses at the lighthouse’s base, so that the sea was so close and so loud that it felt like a fifth person – a family member who was never far away. Her earliest memory is being shown the pots of paraffin whilst licking the butter off a currant bun; her second earliest is polishing the lens. And she had loved her lighthouse life. She’d loved winding the weights back up to the top of the stairs, and learning Morse code, and she had loved the view so much that she’d dreamed of keeping the light herself one day. Emmeline Bright – with her own jacket and hat. But lighthouse-keeping was never seen as woman’s work. When she married Jack Bundy at eighteen, she left the lantern behind her. She moved south and inland, into the farm called Wind Rising. From light and high seas to a dark-roomed house; from saltwater to sheep. Only half a mile from one life to the other, but those had been such different lives. And how many years had she walked through the creaking rooms of Wind Rising, with its missing roof tiles and open fire which threw smoke into the sitting room when the wind shifted itself? Long enough. Those years of smelling of sheep, of wedging paper under the uneven legs of chairs. All four children were born in that house, or near it. All of them were late to show their faces except Tom – of course. Tom leapt out early, as if too excited to wait.
She pushes fertiliser into the earth. Easterly – like all names on Parla, its name is forthright, brusque. It is simple – as if we are all fools and need to be told plainly. She, Jack and their youngest child moved here when it became free. A man called Strutt – a mainlander, sullen, bad teeth and bad manners – had died during those wild winter storms of nearly thirty years ago, and Emmeline had carried cardboard boxes of toys, books, bed linen, clothes and kitchen utensils over to Easterly in the following spring. Ian, as the eldest son, stayed at Wind Rising. He had been twenty-three that March. He took on the farm, with Nathan to help him – as boys were meant to, back then. They had no choice in it, really, for their father had started his heart trouble in the autumn before and could no longer farm. It had changed Jack – that shock, the air ambulance and the diet that was forced upon him left him a weaker man who could no longer haul sheep onto their rumps to shear them, or change tractor tyres. And Hester had already met George Moss. So Ian and Nathan became real farmers; and Emmeline, Jack and young Tom moved over the fields to this easterly place.
She counts on her fingers. Tom had been thirteen years old.
Those were my best years. Perhaps she should say that her best years were the first few of her marriage, or when all her children were young – but that’s not the truth. She loved the days when her eldest boys were farmers, men in their twenties who were strong and well-made and living their own lives, men who’d kiss their mother’s hair when they came in to see her but who went into her fridge without asking as if they were still small boys. She’d smiled, at that. Hester was in love – blooming with it. And Tom had spent his days running through fields or on beaches, coming back in the evenings with his pockets filled with shells or feathers or mussels for eating and with a head filled with stories. Mum, guess what I heard? She loved how he smelled. She loved how her youngest boy filled the house with his own sounds – his voice as he talked to the cat, his music, his bedsprings, the scuffing of his socked feet on the kitchen’s flagstone floor.
Those were Jack’s best years too, in some ways. He had nearly died, and survived it. A quietness came to him that he had never had before – gratitude, perhaps, or an awareness for the first time that he would be gone one day. He was a better husband, after his heart attack. He became the man she’d hoped for, all along. She remembers holding his hand in this garden, on a summer’s morning like this.
Her peonies nod in the breeze.
How does a person ever speak of their loss? How do they find the right words for it? Emmeline has never really been the talking kind.
She looks down at her hands. The hand cream has served no purpose. She has soil beneath her fingernails, again – brown crescent moons. Only a farmer or his wife would have hands like this, day in and day out. She had made her wedding vows with neat, square nails, and the following evening she’d glanced down at her hands – dirtied from the chicken shed, and from picking blackberries from the patch by the back door – and had thought this is how it will be, now. These are my married hands. She nearly lost her wedding ring, once, during the lambing season. A farmer’s wife’s hands, even now.
Briefly, there is resentment. It rises a little, like a far-out wave.
Emmeline looks up. A man is coming to her. He is a man, but he is also one of her sons, and so despite his age she still sees the child who had knocked his front milk teeth out when he fell on the quayside, the boy who believed, solemnly, that he’d heard sleigh bells on the roof one Christmas Eve. Nathan wears a white shirt. He walks with his hands in his pockets and when he sees her, he frees one hand and holds it up at her. He bends his fingers in a small, boyish wave.
Hello, she says. She hugs him by the peonies, and she can smell the sea in his hair. She does not hug for long, but when Emmeline goes to pull away from him she finds that Nathan is still holding her. He holds her very tightly, too tightly. She waits. She stays as she is, being held, and it is only when his arms start, at last, to soften, that she leans back from him and looks at his face – at the straight nose, the shining eyes – and she breathes, what is it? What’s wrong?
* * *
Nathan knew it had to be him who told her. Ian wouldn’t think of it. He’d call it unimportant or nothing to do with me. He probably slept well last night, snoring in Wind Rising as if nothing had changed, as if no man had been found at Sye.
Nathan has not slept at all. He knows it shows. Kitty said as much when she crept downstairs to find him still sitting in the armchair, an empty glass tilted in his lap. She’d said, you look like crap, Mr Bundy, smiling and stroking his knee.
As he’d walked along the lane to Easterly he’d tried out the different words in his head, whispered them under his breath, and he’d hoped that perhaps his mother would be out – that he’d find a note on the doormat saying gone to shop or elsewhere. But he’d looked up and seen her. She’d been tending to those pink flowers of hers, and he’d thought she looks old. The hunched back, the iron-grey hair.
When they’d hugged, Nathan had felt small again.
Now, they stand inside. She is looking at him, waiting. She licks her lips as she always does when she is nervous, and she says is it Kitty?
No.
Hester, then? Ian? The grandchildren?
No, Mum. Everyone’s fine.
You? Are you fine?
Been better …
Are you ill?
Mum … He’s forgotten the words. He tries to think of them but cannot so he puts his hands on top of her hands and says listen. Some stuff happened last night. At Sye.
Sye? She is frowning. The cove?
Sam Lovegrove was walking up there –
What happened? Did he fall, or …?
Sam’s OK, too. Mum, listen – he found a man. Washed up on the beach.
Emmeline is still.
Sam thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. He was lying on his front … Sam ran to the farm and got us – me, Ian, Jonny. We all went to Sye, and we carried him back. Took him to Aunt Tabitha’s.
Nathan pauses, breathes. He watches his mother’s face, and waits until her eyes show what he knows she will, shortly, be thinking. He waits. He waits. And then he sees her eyes change.
She says, Oh God …
Mum, it isn’t Tom.
How do you know? It might be.
He takes her wrists. No. It’s not. That’s what I’m here to tell you. It is not Tom.
Does he look like him?
Nathan winces. In part, I guess. Yes. But he is too tall. He is too tall, and he is wider than Tom ever was. The teeth are wrong, and –
It’s been four years. People change in four years. They grow.
Mum –
He’s at Tabitha’s? She breaks frees of him, hauls her jacket off the hook behind the door. I’ve got to go there.
Mum, he’s not Tom –
She shakes her head, she can’t hear him. She is fumbling in the pocket of her jacket, finds the car keys, and she trips out of the house into the sunlight and gets into the car.
Nathan calls, Mum! But he only calls it once. He is too tired to stop her, and knows she cannot be stopped. He stands on the grass and watches her go – over the potholes, past the log-pile. Once her car is gone he shuts his eyes.
The wind pushes at him. He can feel it, buffeting.
When he looks again he sees a plastic toy windmill on a stick, beside the fence. It turns, in the breeze. It is red, or it was – years of sun have faded it. He watches it turn. A northerly breeze.
What now? He knows.
Somebody else needs to be told – about this washed-up man.
* * *
The plastic windmill turns, and catches the light.
In the mending room at Lowfield, the stranger still sleeps. Tabitha watches his chest rise and fall.
In the harbour, a gull stands on a boat’s tarpaulin cover. It drinks from a pool of rainwater that has gathered there. To swallow, the gull lifts his beak to the sky, straightens its neck and gulps twice. Afterwards, it shakes its tail.
Sam sees this gull. He is at the top of the harbourmaster’s house – a double-fronted, red-bricked building that sits on the quayside. From his attic room, he can see everything – the harbour, the sea wall, the open water beyond it. He can see the mainland too – dipped and bluish, like a sleeper’s back. It is a good room. The eaves mean that Sam must stoop in places but he likes being here at the top of the house. His bedroom is untidy, boyish – a music system, a games console, a dartboard, crumbs on the carpet, mugs of cold tea, a row of free weights that he lifts in the evenings as he looks at the view. A single bed which is never made.
He sits on this bed now. He sits with his hands underneath him, looking out to sea. Sam did not sleep last night, or barely. When he closed his eyes he was there again – standing on the coastal path and looking down at Sye. He could see the man exactly. He can see him now.
Dark hair.
The fingers that tried to close around a stone.
Last night, Sam had thrown up by the sea wall. When he’d returned home, wiping his mouth, he’d found his father watching the news and whispered Dad? Something’s happened. He’d sounded young, afraid.
Things are passed on here. Houses, jobs, names – they are handed down to the next generation because that is the island’s way. This has always been a Lovegrove house. Sam’s great-great-grandfather had been the captain of the first Morning Star and he’d built this house himself with a clear sense of the Lovegroves yet to come. He’d captained the boat for fifty-six years. When he died, his son took over; then his son did. And a century later, the captain and harbourmaster of Parla is Edward Lovegrove, with his receding hairline and chapped hands, and last night this man had been watching the television with his feet on the coffee table. He’d lowered his feet when he saw Sam’s face.
What is it, son?
Ed is the law on Parla, if there is such a thing. Ed will know – a common phrase. It’s only based on his first aid certificates, his knowledge of the water and the radio in his study which he can talk to the coastguard on. It isn’t much, but it’s enough. A man’s come ashore.
What? Dead?
Alive.
Do we know him?
No. But for a moment, I …
Sam shifts now, stretches. He can feel the weight of a sleepless night on his shoulders. A night of hearing the curtains stir, of watching the hours tick across the neon face of his clock. In the last few minutes before daybreak, he’d been nearing sleep – drifting, growing heavier. But then the phone had rung. It had bubbled up the stairs, rousing him. His father had answered it. He’d said, hello Tabitha. Yes. Yes – Sam told me …
Everyone will know by now, Sam thinks. Or most of them, at least.
This is a fact that he is sure of: it is hard to have secrets here. Something happens and the island feels it. If a cat kills a bird in the morning, the feathers will have blown into each house by nightfall; if there is a quarrel on the quayside, the account of it will be unloaded with the rest of the boat, and carried inland. Guess what I saw … And taps will be turned off by women who think they have misheard their children or their friends, and say what? Really? Elbows will be taken hold of in the lanes. When he was a boy, there was a fire at the school one night and the red-edged curls of paper floated over the island, settled on the outboard motors, roofs and bonnets of cars – and Sam thinks news is like that. It gets everywhere. Never any secrets, never any surprises and he has wondered if that’s what has buckled Leah in the past – the lack of privacy, the way that all things are known.
Phones will be ringing. Hands will reach for other hands.
Emmeline … Will she rage? Grapple? Most likely.
And Sam thinks of Maggie. Who will tell her? And how will she be, when she’s told? He imagines her face. He sees the lines by her eyes, how she holds her fingers up to her mouth as she listens. How broken she can look.
Nearly four years.
He glances down at Sea Fairy. Her green tarpaulin is streaked with gull droppings. She bobs in the corner – old, unloved.
* * *
The sun is high and white. The grass is shining. Laundry is pegged on washing lines.
All the colours seem bright, as Nathan drives. He squints at the school’s roof, at the glossy tail of the rooster at Wind Rising, at the ragwort sprouting in the lane. Even the lighthouse’s paintwork seems brighter to him so that he reaches up for the car’s visor and tilts it down. Has there been a hotter day than this, this year? He doesn’t think so. He drives slowly, with his window down. His right forearm rests on the door and he can hear the long grass brushing the underside of his car. Once he’d have loved this weather. He’d have taken beers into the fields or left them in a rock-pool to cool, as he swam. Or he’d have taken a rug up to the lighthouse and the northern coast and spent the afternoon there – him, and Kitty.
A ewe treads in front of him.
One of mine. Nathan knows this. He knows his own, amongst Ian’s; they are Texel, firm-bodied with blue tags in their ears. They are trickier to shear in that they’re strong beasts, and two weeks ago he’d had to kneel hard on their ribs and tie their hind legs as he’d sheared them. Shearing … It’s in the Bundy blood. Ian, Hester and Nathan could all handle shears before they learnt to ride bikes or to add and subtract. They knew how to catch a sheep, drag it back and grip it tightly between their thighs before they knew how to spell Cantalay or Merme. Tom was the exception. He’d shear, but he’d have one eye on the water. Nathan grew strong from hauling sheep and mending fences; Tom’s arms thickened from lobstering, from pulling on the cord to start the outboard motor, from rowing into hidden coves.
Are you sure he’s one of ours? Their father said this, once. We’re land folk, not sea.
Nathan glances to his right.
Crest is coming into view. He sees its yellow guttering, its matching yellow door. This is the island’s highest point – the whole coastline can be seen from its driveway, from Litty in the south, round to Bundy Head. The house had been derelict, once. Once, it had been four stone walls with a leaking roof and the brown streaks of sheep urine on the skirting boards. But it was always the best position to live – the height, the views. Nathan remembers ducking through it as a child and feeling how a king in his castle must have felt – alive, amazed, buffeted by wind. Tom, also, felt that. When he was twenty-four he’d said, do you know what I’m going to do? For six summers he worked on that house. He’d hammered, hauled and rung friends on the mainland; he’d buy beers for his brothers before saying, you couldn’t help me with …? He made Crest a home again. And what a home – with bookshelves made of driftwood, curtains hung on lengths of rope, a septic tank, a compost heap, a chair forged out of wooden crates, a single solar panel as dark as a burnished eye. There was the chalky knot of whalebone Tom used to prop open the door. And the kitchen table had been part of a fishing boat, once; her name, Coralee, still hangs on the staircase. Nathan has seen it.
Tomato plants, too. Those were Maggie’s addition. The porch is south-facing and she’s filled it with them so that Nathan knows how the porch will smell today, when he enters it – the sharp fruit, the trapped heat.
He turns right, along its driveway.
Crest. He loves it and it saddens him – both.
He turns off the engine. There is a sudden hush, and he wonders what he will tell her, what words he will use and if they will be the right ones.
