Impossible Causes

by Julie Mayhew

  ‘Sometimes,’ she replied, with a straight face. ‘But I’d rather you caught that ship.’

  We walked down the brick path, through the tunnel of sycamore and birch. The showers of March had made everything sprout lushly, and April was offering us a small taste of sun, penetrating the leaves, the ground dancing with soft snatches of light. I tried to seal a picture of it in my mind – the smell, the feeling. I plucked a nascent sycamore key from the floor and put the hard lime-coloured unreadiness of it in my pocket.

  My mother, a long cardigan wrapped around her, talked about Martha Signal, how she had pulled my mother aside on the cobbles to say that she knew her elder son was straying, misbehaving. She was ashamed of him, she said, but also, she felt guilty – she and her husband had not done enough to counter the influence of others, and they would have to work harder to make sure Michael, their younger, was protected. ‘Don’t think me bad,’ Martha had said, ‘when I tell you that I still love Luke though, very, very much.’ I thought of the boy, the man, sprawled on his back after I’d thrown him to the ground, anger twisting his face, the blood-hot sense of relief that had drenched me when I realised he wasn’t Ben.

  ‘I’m a selfish person,’ I blurted out. ‘I’m acting selfishly.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ agreed my mother, ‘this is a conversation about me! Me and Martha Signal. She’s invited me to be part of the “Easter Committee”, you know.’

  ‘But Easter’s gone,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ she replied, ‘if only it were that simple. If only it came and went, never to return.’

  We peered over the well’s edge – to the gold and the bones that lay out of sight, to the mobile phone that had, in its way, been traded for some truth.

  ‘We can ask the well a specific question, can we?’ I said. ‘Dad never told me that.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know the rules, Leah. No one does. We’re all making it up as we go along.’ She looked at me suddenly. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’

  ‘No!’ I said, startled.

  She nodded slowly. Her heavy-lidded eyes – a mirror of my own – did a brief check of my face and belly for a lie.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

  She held the picture over the deep darkness below – that studio portrait of the four of us taken by a cousin of a cousin of someone who’d visited the island way back when, with their roll of marbled backdrop, their white umbrella and a lamp on a stand

  ‘Don’t you want to keep it for the memories?’ I’d asked her at the house when she’d selected it for her sacrifice, working the hinges of the frame to set it free.

  ‘Got all my memories up here,’ she’d replied, tapping the side of her head. ‘And also I have Paul’s copy somewhere in one of these boxes. He never took it with him to the mainland. Just don’t tell the well that, in case it dilutes the amount of truth we get in return.’

  She let the picture slip from her fingers and the paper swayed left and right, following the path of least resistance, our faces, our smiles, falling out of focus, then disappearing.

  We stayed peering over the well, as if the reward of knowledge would fly right back up in physical form, something we could grasp a hold of.

  ‘Why are you being like this?’ I asked my mother.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Different,’ I replied. Not upset is what I wanted to say but instead I said, ‘Happy.’

  ‘I’m taking a leaf out of your book, Leah. I’m choosing to be that way.’

  She drove fists into her cardigan pockets and rested her hip against the well. I found my body echoing hers, so I adjusted my stance, slightly, to be the same but different.

  ‘Is that what I’m doing?’ I asked. ‘Choosing to be happy? Because right now it feels like I’m running away.’

  ‘Or running towards.’

  I shrugged. ‘Has the well given you your answer yet?’

  She put her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes, mouth ajar as if receiving the host.

  ‘I’m not going,’ she said, blinking her eyes open again. ‘But I knew that before I threw the photo in.’

  ‘Then why did you –’

  ‘It was always best to make your father feel like he had some say in a decision, even though he didn’t.’ She said it conspiratorially, leaning close, as if the whole trip to the well had been a game for my benefit, as maybe it had.

  Then she burst into tears.

  ‘At the end of the day,’ she said, as we held one another under the chlorophyll glow of the trees, ‘I’m too scared to go. The future is for the young.’

  On the last Saturday, Ben and I drank at the Anchor with Ruth French and Cat Walton – the outrageous act of two people who were secretly about to leave. Ruth and Cat were unaware of our plan; Ben wanted the school to think that he was following through on his contract for the whole year. He didn’t want any knowing glances from Ruth across the staff room ‘rousing suspicions’ – the suspicions of Miriam Calder and Mr Crane, I assumed, but also those of the Eldest Girls.

  ‘They’ll feel betrayed by my going,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, and when he couldn’t formulate a response, I didn’t push him, because I knew I was betraying them too.

  The cliques in the bar that Saturday night were more defined than ever. The Calders drank with the Cranes and the Bishys. Dellie Leven and Faith Moran and their boatmen husbands held an uneasy middle-ground. Eyes flickered to me – the madwoman. They were all poised, fielders manning their bases, waiting for a freak shot. I shaped my smile carefully for each group of people. This I would not miss: the constant need to locate myself, and manage the way the island saw me.

  Saul Cooper appeared, late into the evening, taking a stool at the bar, sitting hooked over his drink, never giving us his face, speaking only to Jed. I looked to Ben and saw how his jaw tightened, controlling the testosterone fizz of a score unsettled.

  Mary Ahearn also came in late, insisting that I bump a glass against hers in a way that made me suspect my mother had told her what was going on, despite her pledges to keep my departure a secret.

  ‘I hope you’ve got some gin in that juice,’ Mary said with a wink, sucking up the foam of her bitter. I had, just the one shot, for courage.

  When we left around 10 p.m., as I hugged Cat and Ruth a little too tightly in our goodbyes, Viola was on the cobbles with her dog, sitting on top of the stocks, her back to us, looking out towards the boats bobbing and clinking in the harbour. She had the air of someone who was waiting. I had only ever seen her in that oversized maroon coat with its mud splatters, dirty jeans underneath. That night she wore a striking furry coat – leopard print. Her hair was not its usual orange halo but shone oily in the glimmer of the half-moon and the string-lights, the curls defined.

  She turned at the sound of us on the cobbles, one knee jutting out sideways, revealing heavy boots of the kind Britta Sayers preferred, too big on her feet, and also the hem of a skirt, short and black. Her lips were blood red; she looked like a child who’d been left alone with her mother’s make-up.

  ‘Viola!’ I called.

  ‘Leave her,’ said Ben, making a grab for my hand.

  They had been talking in the Anchor, the men and their wives, I’d heard them, about what should be done with the coycrock girl. Her mother was a lost cause, but the girl could be saved if she was taken under the Council’s wing. I knew she shouldn’t be out there, dressed like that.

  ‘Viola!’ I called again, and she stood then, pulling the leopard coat tighter around her, making off towards the smokehouse, hunched over, as if this might render her invisible.

  ‘Let her go,’ said Ben. ‘Don’t invite more trouble.’

  That was how he saw it – the girl making us meet that night at the stones. Not as something fortuitous and necessary.

  ‘But she was our Cupid,’ I said, as Ben walked me to my door, ‘in the end.’

  ‘Then how do you explain Saul Cooper turning up?’ he asked. ‘And this?’ The
skin on his chin had split nastily, an inch-long laceration that had needed stitches from Dr Bishy, Ben telling the man that he’d tripped during an early-morning run, and no, he wasn’t prepared to have the sewing-up done at the Counting House as a public event.

  ‘It was a coincidence,’ I’d said, the only explaining I ever wanted to do when it came to Saul Cooper.

  Ben and I parted without even a kiss. We knew that we were being watched from the windows of the Anchor. I fumbled for my keys at the front door – since the paint attack, I never left the cottage unlocked – and that was when I saw Luke Signal lope out of the darkness on the path from the East Bay. I saw him look across to the stocks, pause, unsure, then lope away again, back in the direction he’d come from.

  Tuesday evening, I sat at the green baize of Margaritte’s table one last time. She dealt out my cards, focusing for the longest time on the Star – a picture of a naked woman pouring one vessel of water into a pond and another onto the earth, an eight-pointed guiding light above her, a tree of life within reach. Margaritte wanted me to understand how auspicious this card was; it signalled broader horizons, the courage to seize opportunities, wonderful revelations, the chance of finding a true home.

  She flipped smoothly into scripture: ‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.’

  ‘And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes,’ I replied, ‘and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.’

  We were quiet for a moment.

  Then: ‘No one ever comes back,’ she said. I was used to this now, Margaritte knowing things before she’d been told. ‘They all cross over with promises to bring help and are never seen again.’

  ‘I’m not promising that,’ I told her. ‘I’m not proud. I’m only saving myself and…’

  ‘Your future children?’ she finished, a rescue from the embarrassment of a confession. I am a witch, and also a whore; my crimes are clearly two-fold.

  I looked down at the mirroring of our splayed hands on the table – my fingers white, the nails short and neat, yet to be troubled with any real work; Margaritte’s thin but heavy-knuckled, the tracks of veins leading to nails that had grown thick and pearly.

  She turned over one hand to reveal the angriness of a new India-ink tattoo on her wrist.

  ‘You?’ I said. ‘It was you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘They’ve needed my counsel these last few months.’

  She unbuttoned the top of her blouse, pulling it and her silky slip aside to reveal older symbols across her upper chest, some faded to almost nothing.

  ‘The fishermen have them too, hidden under their shirts, for protection at sea,’ she said. ‘But you need them on the land too, I find.’

  Thursday, I packed.

  Margaritte had found me a suitcase, a rare object on the island. When I asked where it had come from, this hard, cream clamshell with its paisley lining and mildewed pockets, she had shrugged as if she could not remember, told me that the universe had heard my need and delivered.

  I had very little and would take only essentials. My mother was going to move into the cottage soon, whether it was Luke who claimed the lodge or someone else. I didn’t want the place to feel empty, stripped of all life.

  The wooden heart I lifted from the window latch and fingered the rough grooves of its carving for a moment, appreciating again the effort, thinking how I had never thanked Ben for making it, this surprising skill of his. Then I returned it to the window. I had the real thing joining me on my journey to the mainland, a real love. I needed no keepsake, no charm.

  Intention to travel was to be registered the day before; I left it to the last moment. Even then, there would be almost a whole day for the news to drop like a stone in a pool, sending its ripples to the edges.

  Saul was out on the dogleg jetty when I crossed the cobbles, binoculars held to his face, braced against the safety of the railings that abutted the Customs House. I fought the sea breeze, holding down my lifting coat, pulling back the hair that whipped against my face, and went to stand beside him.

  ‘What can you see?’ I asked.

  He dropped the binoculars to glance at me, returning to them quickly.

  ‘An egret, I think, a white one, on the rocks out there. They come this time of year to breed.’

  ‘Really,’ I said flatly; he’d used that word deliberately it felt – breed.

  ‘Take a look.’ He handed me the binoculars, nudging them gently so I could pick out the small outcrop a few hundred metres from our shore, something white on top, extending its long neck.

  ‘Beautiful,’ I said. ‘You like birds?’

  ‘I like nearly all of the visitors to our island.’ This time he was scoring a point; I chose to concede it.

  ‘The seals came back this year too,’ I said, the lives of wild creatures being so much easier to discuss than our own.

  ‘Oh, no, they haven’t been back here for years,’ Saul said with a shake of his head.

  I didn’t understand. I’d heard one of the boatmen that week say that he had seen them. Had he lied? Seen things? Convinced himself of something out of blind hope?

  ‘The seals have some sense at least,’ said Saul, and he grasped my hand suddenly, making me flinch. I looked him in the eye, found myself gripping his hand in return.

  ‘Could it not be mine?’ he said. ‘The baby?’

  The craving in his voice was unbearable. I gulped and gulped, willing myself to respond with something gentle, but instead I croaked out an accusation: ‘You drink with Jed Springer now?’

  He let go. He stepped away, contemplating me for a moment, taking in the long view.

  ‘Right,’ he said, his tone brisk. ‘Let’s get you registered for this ship, then, shall we, the lovely Miss Cedars!’

  He pulled opened the side door of the Customs House and we entered that way. I saw his back office for the first time – the radio equipment there, the vast horizon of ocean in the window. I saw the camp bed, the toothbrush, a sketchbook. I saw the chisel and the whittling knife, beside a half-worked piece of oak.

  What was it, I wondered, with our island and our misplaced hearts? One riven with nails, harms the wrong man; another is carved with love by the wrong man in the first place.

  I said nothing.

  At the front desk, I filled out my particulars on a form and watched Saul copy this across into a ledger, using a fountain pen.

  ‘This one is for island records,’ he said. ‘I’ll enter all the necessaries on the Border Agency computer.’

  I let him record my profession as ‘teacher’, no discussion as to whether this was still true. My training certificate was rolled up in my suitcase. Soon I would know what it was worth.

  ‘Visiting Paul, are you?’ Saul said as he wrote, an official voice, cheerfulness a duty. ‘To tell him about your father? Your mother never did get through on the satellite phone, did she?’

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. Were we playing a scene? Pretending everything was fine, that I was only going for a short while and returning the following month. Was he pretending that Ben’s name wasn’t already there in the ledger above mine?

  I looked down at the watermarked page.

  Friday 13 April, 2018

  Outgoing passengers.

  Passenger No. 1 – Leah Cedars

  Ben’s name wasn’t there. But he knew that he had to register. I’d told him. I’d told him!

  ‘Do we have until midnight?’ I said.

  Saul glanced up, a little too expectantly. ‘For what?’

  ‘To register to travel.’

  He checked the clock on the wall above the desk as it twitched a minute after six.

  ‘Ah, you’re well within the time limit,’ he said, returning to his calligraphy. ‘You don’t need to worry, Leah. You don’t need to worry at all.’

  EAST
ERTIDE 2018

  There was barely a moon.

  It was the perfect night for sleeping on your troubles, not for rising up, challenging them. But still, all across the island, in the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night, they were about and misbehaving – as Proverbs tells us women are wont to do. They were being loud and stubborn, not abiding in their houses, slipping through the keyholes.

  They were in the streets, lying in wait at every corner.

  At nightfall, Leah Cedars was seen at the Billet House. She walked straight in, forgoing the politeness of a knock, and there was the glimpse of a scene – figures illuminated, two men close, then jumping apart. The door snapped shut on its hinges.

  All that remained were voices.

  ‘He’s not here,’ said the one who sounded like the landlord’s brother. ‘It’s only us.’

  ‘Try the Anchor,’ said the other in a low monotone – this was surely Abe Powell.

  ‘How can I?’ she replied. ‘It’s a weekday.’

  Feet shuffled awkwardly on the boards within.

  ‘Crane and Bishy are going up to the farmstead,’ came Abe Powell’s voice, tentative. ‘To speak to the girl while the mother sleeps. Does your handsome teacher help them?’

  ‘No,’ said Leah Cedars quickly, firmly. ‘No.’

  ‘Then maybe,’ came Jed’s suggestion, ‘he’ll be out looking for the Eldest Girls. He’s always got some business with them.’

  ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ were Leah’s prickly last words. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you in your business.’

  The younger Signal boy caught Leah as she was leaving; or she caught him, depending on where you believe the power lies.

  He wanted to know what she was doing there. He called her ‘Miss’.

  ‘I might ask the same thing of you,’ Leah Cedars replied, squinting at her watch. ‘What are you doing here at this time of night?’

  ‘I’m looking for my brother?’ the boy said – a question or a suggestion, rather than a clear statement.

  Leah nodded; she sighed, told him: ‘I’m not “Miss” to you anymore. I’m no longer your teacher.’ And it was this fact perhaps that allowed her to be selfish, to leave the boy to his skulking, in the darkness, at that late hour.