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Emmeline leaves, and as she goes she feels, too, the swell of anger – as if someone, somewhere, is laughing. As if a trick has been played.
* * *
Who else? Who else cannot know what to think or say? They are all like fish on land now – blank-eyed, open-mouthed.
What a day … Ed Lovegrove stands with his hands in his pockets; he looks out to sea. Boy oh boy, what a day … Eighteen years as a harbourmaster, thirty-nine years as a harbourmaster’s son before that, and Edward can’t remember a man being washed ashore like this. Bodies, yes. He’s had his deaths to deal with – Jack’s, a birdspotter’s, that man from Utta who caught his foot in the line as he was throwing out pots so that they found his boat going round and round and when they hauled in the line he was already half-plucked at by fish. Ed fears the watery deaths. It is the watery deaths that he feels he can prevent by watching the weather, noting down each boat that docks here, keeping an eye on the weather station that lives at the back of his house. He has a rain gauge; there is a small anemometer to measure wind speed and wind direction. He tends to it, like a man at prayer.
But a person who has appeared? That the sea has given?
Tabitha rang earlier. She’d given the details – the beard, the injured hands – and Ed had not known the words or the way forwards. He’d said it isn’t a death, is it? So …? A man washed ashore is the stuff of books; it is not what happens in the twenty-first century to an island that relies on tourism and migrant birds and the sinking price of lamb. An island with a coloured line of jetsam – plastics, netting, nylon rope – on every beach like a scar.
We wait until he wakes. We do nothing till he’s woken.
I should call the coastguard in case …
OK, said Tabitha. But not the police. Not yet.
Fine. Not yet, Ed agreed. The police, he knows, would bring trouble of their own.
So Ed had settled in the office of the harbourmaster’s house and made the call. Mac had answered. He was eating something. With a half-full mouth he’d said, really? Jesus. Need an air ambulance?
Tab says not. Any boats down?
There had been the distant click of computer keys, and when the clicking stopped he’d heard Mac swallow, clear his throat. Nope, no boats, Ed. Well, there was a dinghy capsized about twenty miles north of you, but both men were picked up. He’s not one of yours? A guest, or some such?
I’m sure he is. Just checking, you know.
Or some half-fish creature? A part-whale? Haven’t you guys got a tale about that sort of thing? A hard, single laugh.
Mac – who Ed has never warmed to. Thanks, he’d said, hung up.
* * *
The day fades. The sky pinkens.
It is low tide. The beaches are glassy. The wading birds are reflected in the sand and sometimes they make their short, skimming flight to a different stretch of sand and land with their legs stretched out.
Curlews. Nathan hears them.
He turns off the engine but he sits, for a while. He stares at the steering wheel. Nathan has no thoughts at this moment: he is empty, worn-out.
Kitty watches him. She wears a floral apron, and as she’d been picking bits of eggshell out of a bowl of yolks she’d heard his car, looked up.
Her husband is staring at something – the dashboard?
Then he climbs out. The car door shuts and there is the crunch of the gravel, and from an upstairs bed the cat jumps down with a muffled thud as Nathan comes into the hallway, kicks off his boots.
She wipes her hands, goes to him. He tastes of salt. So?
They sit at the kitchen table, facing each other. His wife has a sweep of navy-blue powder on her eyelids, and Nathan sees that some of this powder is also on her cheekbones as if it has dusted down through the course of the day. She smells as she always does – lotion, Miss Dior, a touch of turpentine. Kitty Bundy. At first, she’d called it a dancing name.
Mum went straight to Lowfield. I told her it wasn’t Tom but she still went.
Of course she did – softly said.
Seven years of marriage but the word wife can still feel new to him. This woman – rich-haired, curved, slow in her movements – leans forwards, over her glass. She looks down into it, holds it by the stem and swirls the wine very carefully. Her hair comes down as she does this. She has not aged – not even slightly. She looks as she did when he first met her, when she turned around in a scarlet dress.
And Maggie? Did you go to see her?
I did. He sighs, rubs his eyes.
How did she take it?
It’s been a long day, Kit – which is his way of asking for silence, now.
She leans back. She takes her hair and gathers it, holding it on the top of her head with both hands, and for a moment Nathan can see her white neck, the tiny tattoo of a bird at the nape. Well. Mine was long too. I’ve worked all day – ten hours of it. Do you want to hear about it? She waits.
Nathan says nothing.
Kitty lets go of her hair, pushes her chair back. The bird on her neck goes away.
Maggie was calm – Kitty is certain of this. Maggie, who is too neat and reserved and dignified to wail in company, or throw things at the wall. Small-boned and gentle. And she is contained, in the way cupped water is – full of reflections and moments but they pass too quickly for Kitty to read them clearly. As Kitty rinses the plates of omelette, she can see Maggie perfectly – how she’d waded out from Lock-and-Key beach on the night that Tom died. Her pink shirt had darkened as the water reached her waist, and she’d called out Tom? Tom?
Vulnerable, and lonely. Kind. Old-souled.
And she is on her own, of course. No family in the world. Having Sam Lovegrove watching your house at night is not proper company. They all try to see more of her, but she hides herself away.
It is not how Kitty would grieve. She, if she had to, would grieve wildly – with noise, mucus, paint on the canvas, blustery walks on beaches, curse words and exhausted sleep. But everyone grieves differently just as everyone loves in different ways. Emmeline is resentful; Nathan has retreated or almost, and he still drinks on his own at night. The crate that she leaves in the lane for recycling is always clinking, and full.
Their cat – tabby, overweight – butts her head against her shins.
Kitty leans down to stroke her, and as she does this she wonders how you can grieve a death if you have no bones, if you have nothing to bury or go back to. Poor Maggie. Poor thing.
When she turns to speak to her husband again, she finds his chair is empty. He’s gone away soundlessly, so that Kitty drops the tea-towel onto the worktop and stares where he had been.
* * *
And so the bedside lights go on, one by one.
The television’s bluish glow flits in island sitting rooms. Curtains are pulled into the middle, and closed. In a bedroom of Wind Rising, a girl with bitten fingernails holds her mobile phone. She sits cross-legged on her bed, and types sounds like a hard day. Hope you are OK. Does she put one x, after this, or several? Leah chooses one, and presses send. The words fly. Sending. Then, Sent.
Beneath the lighthouse, in the old lighthouse-keepers’ quarters, Rona Lovegrove bends down. She peers through the glass door of her oven, watches her sponge cake rise. She has heard this man looks like Tom. She thinks of the Bundys, and thinks of love.
Jim Coyle lies in bed. He lies in his own darkness. He tries to imagine the lighthouse’s slow flash. Jim – like the Brights – was born in the lighthouse-keepers’ quarters; unlike the Brights, he became the lighthouse-keeper himself, in time – and he misses so much about it. The drowsy tick of cogs in the lantern room. The sweet smell of paraffin. Sticky, blackish knuckles from polishing the brass.
He is blind now. But Jim still knows each crack in the plaster, each decorative curl on the wrought-iron fireplace where he used to toast crumpets, each speckle of paint that made it onto windowpanes. There was a loose brick in the boiler room which he kept his penny whistle behind. Is it still there? Might it still play the same tune, if he blew?
Beside him, his wife reads. He can hear the pages as she turns them, how their bottom edges catch the bedspread to make a dragging sound. He asks what book is it?
He asks, but Jim knows. The book has a leather smell. He’d heard its spine crack as she’d opened it.
Abigail says Folklore and Myth. You know the one.
Yes he does. And as soon as Jim had heard that a man – bearded, very handsome – had been washed up at the cove called Sye, he’d known that this was the book that his wife would turn to. She’d take it from its shelf, and find its fourteenth page. She’d smooth that page with her palm.
Dearest, she says – do you know what this reminds me of?
Abigail of the stories. Abigail who is eighty-three years old and yet whose love of this one book is absolute, childlike.
The Fishman. Your Fishman. The one you saw off Sye.
And there it is – the word he knew was coming. Like so many other words, it is uttered and the breeze catches it and it is carried out of the Old Fish Store over the island. It blows against the rusting cars at High Haven; it scuds on the beaches with the night-time spume. It has been down on the sea bed, perhaps; for years, it has been half-forgotten, tapped at by passing claws. But Abigail has hauled up Fishman now. The word surfaces – beautiful, glass-bright.
* * *
This word will make its way to all of us, in time. It will knock against our doors and we will all be saying it. Even I will talk of the Fishman – but not yet.
Night. People turn to sleep. They close the back door, or rub cream on their feet. They finish their chapters or lie in deep baths with tea lights next to the taps and think about the day’s events. In the cottage by the school a couple are making love. The brown dog at the foot of their bed yawns with a whine, flaps his ears, and they break away from their kissing and smile at the sound in the dark.
One by one, eyes close.
But also, two eyes open. In a room that smells of lavender, two black eyes open, blink twice. Three times.
He lies very still, listening.
After a while, he lifts the blankets, looks down at his long, white legs.
As for Maggie, she climbs out of the bath. She wraps a towel about her. Four years have passed, or nearly four. Who told her the grief would lessen? Grief does not lessen; it changes, and perhaps she has changed so that she can endure it better. But the grief does not grow less.
She misses him beyond words. She will never have the words for how much she misses him.
The Seals with Human Hearts
Of all the sea creatures – whales, turtles, lobsters with their intricate, grooved tails that can slide into themselves like a fan, the jellyfish, the squid, the octopus that I reckon knows far more than I can ever know – it is the seal I love the most. I always have. And it’s hard to be sure if I love the seals for the stories I have heard of them or for their expressions – quizzical, trusting. Both maybe. Both is most likely.
The first seal I ever saw was near Tap Hole. It was winter or late autumn, at least, for I wore woollen gloves with a matching hat. I had the hat pulled down very low. It covered my ears and brushed my eyelashes.
The seal looked human at first. I thought someone was swimming. But then I stood on the edge, squinted and thought I know what that is … Its head was glossy, its eyes were round. Its body was freckled, slick.
Sea-hounds, Emmeline called them. For how they barked at night.
Or they are the souls of the drowned men … So Nathan said. He knew his stories and told them, from time to time.
Me? I liked Abigail’s version most of all. In her well-worn armchair and with her Earl Grey tea she unfolded her book called Folklore and Myth and said, in the beginning, when the world was made, the seals were given human hearts … I asked why – and she’d looked up, surprised. I don’t know why! It doesn’t matter why … What matters is that it says so. She tapped the page – see? I like this because it is fitting; it seems a tale that’s right. For seals are drawn to human voices, after all; they bask on rocks, human-like, and they have eyes that are expressive as human eyes can be and I might easily believe that seals speak our language and feel our private human pains. That they grieve as we do at the world’s sorrows – at its wars, famines, its loneliness and bombs.
Also, they can fall in love. There are tales of seals loving a person so much and so deeply that they wish for that human to join them, at sea. They wait, offshore. They sniff the salty air, and call. And so it has been a form of consolation, in the past: she didn’t drown, not really. Her soul lives with the seals, now … Where she is loved, and well-cared for. Where they dart, dapple-bodied, through shafts of light.
* * *
Abigail Coyle believes this. For her, it is the truth.
Her sister was loved by the seals. Thomasina was loved for she looked like them – with eyes so black that Abigail could see her own face looking back at her. She has a faded photograph that she keeps by her bed – both of them, in matching pinafores. They do not look like twins. They never did. Abigail is the shorter, plumper girl – her dress is straining at the buttons, and one sock is rolled down. Thomasina is taller, with her hair untied so that half of it covers those seal-eyes. But it does not hide the look of suspicion, the narrowed stare as if she does not trust this moment or the person who is saying good … Hold it … On the count of three …
Abigail turns in bed. She looks at this photograph now.
Thomasina. Who was openly called the beautiful one.
She drowned at fifteen. She floated in that pinafore – a damp, patchwork star. And she is buried in the ground but Abigail believes – knows – that her sister’s soul is not in Parla’s graveyard, in a wooden box. Instead, her soul – her, Thomasina’s true self – rolls with the seals that loved her, and which she loved in return. In that cave, they found her. Join us, they said, gentle-eyed. Come and swim at our side. So her twin sister – the elder by nine minutes, the taller by three inches and who could do backbends and walk on her hands – lowered her nose and mouth underwater, closed her eyes, and did.
Abigail pats the pillow. She sorts out the blankets, tucks them round her.
When she heard of this strange, bearded man, her first thought was of her twin. The sea is Thomasina’s. All things that come from it belong to her – the pearled insides of mussel shells, or a squid’s dark ink. And her second thought? It had been of a story she knew. Kept in a leather-bound book.
It has been a long time since she took Folklore and Myth of Parla, Merme and the Lesser Isles off the sitting-room shelf. But this evening she bent down to it, blew off its dust.
It was her mother’s book. In Abigail’s childhood, it was hauled off the shelf in Wind Rising after stormy days or days of such hardship that her mother cried. They read it at bedtime. Its pages were turned very slowly, and they sounded like a person saying hush, now … So many stories. Their mother read them over and over: the whale that answered the foghorn, the gannets which gave their fish to good people, the changing wind of the north. They became friends and they became the truth, for Mercy believed them absolutely. We only know the foam, she’d say – meaning this human world is merely the very surface of it, and there is more, so much more, that we lack the vision for.
Abigail’s mother was from Merme which is an isle known for its strangeness. They ate many things but not seals, never seals – for seals have human hearts.
It is a well-thumbed tale. The seal that has been drawn here lies on its side, one flipper raised as if in greeting. But Abigail keeps turning …
She goes to the fourteenth page.
The Fishman of Sye. It is barely a story – merely a description of this part-man, part-fish. He is tall and strong, it says. He is dark-haired and does not age. There are two drawings of him. In the first, he is in the water: his shoulders are grooved and muscular, and the tip of his tail can be seen. In the second he is on land. He walks on white, capable legs and he is watched by others who are amazed and smiling. Beneath this, it says he comes ashore to restore hope and wonder! He is bearded, and black-eyed.
Hope and wonder. Abigail smiles. She can hear her mother saying it. She can see her mother’s long, straight hair falling down onto the page as she followed the words with her finger. Once, long ago …
The northerly window frame rattles to itself. Jim lies beside her, breathing through his mouth so that he makes a soft, popping sound.
Abigail has not always believed. She did in the beginning. She believed absolutely just as her mother did, and so did Thomasina who claimed she’d seen his tail. They believed all the stories entirely – why should they not be true? If we exist, why shouldn’t they? And it made Abigail feel safe, somehow – to know that seals understood her and a shell that knocks against your foot as you walk is your shell, meant for you, and that nobody actually ever really dies. She’d smile in her bed, to think of this. But then Mercy did die. And a little after, Thomasina died too, and Abigail’s faith was swept out of Wind Rising and lost like autumn leaves are lost – scattered and not coming back. Where is the Fishman, with his bright eyes? Where are the whales that speak of love? How she wanted to see them. How she wanted proof. She’d cry so that her tears dampened her bed-sheets; she’d wear her twin’s coat to bed and snuffle into its sleeves. And one night, Abigail looked at the pictures in her mother’s book and thought please … Send me a sign. Something to prove that the people she loved were not truly gone; something to show her that yes, there are souls, and yes, there is magic, and there are reasons behind everything so that nothing is ever over, or lost. Please … And as if the Fishman heard her or as if the seals heard and passed the message on, there was a new sighting of him. Not by Abigail; Abigail didn’t see him. But the lighthouse-keeper’s son did. The awkward, slightly spotty boy called Jim confessed that yes, he had seen him – a bearded man and a mirrored tail, near the cove called Sye.
Over six decades have passed since then. Six decades, and Abigail can’t climb over stiles any more. Her feet tend to be blue-coloured so she has to prop them on a stool, when she sits. So much has been and gone. And for six decades she has believed in something she herself has never seen but has longed to. And he is here now.
I have been waiting. That is how it feels – as if the Fishman has always meant to come to her and this – now – is his chosen time.
Abigail settles back, closes her eyes.
Hope and wonder. There has never been more need for a touch of that. These are not good days – with all the world’s troubles that she hears on the radio; war in dusty countries, abductions that chill her to the bones. Who is making money on this island, now? No-one is making money. They count coins like beans. Fleece and meat make so little; lobsters do not always come and tourists are the same. No-one seems to have plans as such – no little dreams that may one day be made tangible – and when did that happen? When did the dream-making end? The ambitions, however small? Hers had been small, but she’d had them: a husband, a safe place, a solid Parlan life. Good health for the ones she loves.
And there is so much sadness too. It is a sad isle, for certain. Abigail sees it, and feels it: it is on everything and left there, like salt.
He will come ashore for one or for many.
He will only stay until the next full moon.
She turns out the light. Folklore and Myth lies on the floor beside her; twice in the night she will visit the bathroom, and both times she will bend down to feel its leather edges. It is more than a book to her, as this man is far more – far more – than just a man.
Four
