Kish frowned.
“That’s right,” Alex said. “Which you put there.”
“Me?” his mouth falling open.
There was a trace even of sadness in Kish’s eyes, carried up by the reflected firelight to a dark and private place from which he looked back at Alex. As if he did not know what Alex meant at all.
When Alex noticed his baffled expression, he thought: God help us, will our child be as half-witted?
“Kish, I saw you,” and brought his chin forward. “I saw you kiss her,” harping on it. “Snogging like rabbits in the house that night we came back.”
Kish stiffened at the injustice of the accusation. “Look, Mr Dove…”
Alex held the bottle tighter. He thought: It has taken me this long, but I have got over my qualms, and now I know I can live with the idea it’s going to be all right.
But he could not help it. He felt his resentment unloading. He looked across at Kish who was, before he set another child in train, in a funny way the child that Alex and Merridy had never had. “And why smash all my ships, for God’s sake? My father’s ships.”
Kish uncrossed his legs and leaned back, emptying a pocket. “I guess I’ve done a lot of things that I shouldn’t have done, Mr Dove, but I’m hoping this makes up for it.”
All at once, seeing the wad of dollars, a fierce anger developed in Alex. “I don’t want your money, Kish. You’d be better backing your future rather than mine. On the other hand, I would like to know why you rampaged through my house destroying everything.”
“I was scared,” Kish said, and his eyes jittered. He was agitated now. By Mr Dove’s behaviour. By the memory of what had happened in the corridor. He had never been scared like that, not even as the Buffalo broke up around him. “Mrs Dove, she upset me. She was like a ghost or something.”
“Pah! You were the ghost.”
Kish stood up and placed the money on the table. “Look here, Mr Dove, I came to say I’m sorry for what I did. If you won’t take this, then I’m not sure what I can do. But I’m off.”
“No, you’re not.” Alex leaped from his chair–and the bottle that was in his lap.
He caught up with Kish at the door. Skinny in the oversized trousers and the firelight dancing on the buttons of his shirt. What was it about such a man that he did not have?
“I save you from the sea. I take you in, dress you, feed you. And you fuck my wife.” He shoved him against the wall. He sounded pathetic to himself, so self-pitying.
Kish squirmed out of his grasp. A ruthless look dulled his face and his right arm flexed back. “Don’t, Mr Dove.”
Be careful, Alex! warned the cockatoo above the fireplace, speaking in Merridy’s voice.
As soon as his eyes saw the knife, Alex knew that his next step would determine the rest of his life. He knew this with a clarity that he had not felt since coming face to face with Merridy behind the school.
A log slithered in the grate and untrapped flames glinted on oiled steel. Here, in this room where he remembered two Scrabble players pondering their next word, Alex was on his own. He had outlived both his parents. But over the past few days the prospect of a happiness that they were denied had begun to stretch ahead of him in a precarious but tantalising vista. Blocked suddenly by Kish.
Who started to laugh. His laughter was blended with pity, and the sharp teeth of it prowled closer. “I didn’t want to tell you”–his hand sawed back and forth, he could have been carving an ice-cream stick for a brigantine–“I didn’t want to tell you, Mr Dove.” What he had heard. What he had seen. They were as close to him as…as that bird over there, and he looked out of those isolated eyes in which he saw her lying on the classroom floor, the man on top, her legs around his back, two animals.
“I could have had her. I might have done…”
Don’t listen to him, Alex, the bird entreated. It’s you I love. Not Kish, not anyone else. You–Piers Alexander Dove.
Alex must have taken a step forward because he tripped over the bottle, but recovered his balance. He could hear a child’s voice and Merridy speaking. She was standing in her garden that she had sculpted from the dunes, and by her side there was a boy. She brushed a leaf against his uptilted face, and Alex saw that the boy looked like him at that age. “Lemon balm,” she was explaining. “It gladdens the heart and makes a beautiful tea. Here, give me your hand.” She broke off a frond of bracken and cracked it open and rubbed the creamy stem on his wrist–“to protect you against jack-jumper ants”. She bent down and nipped a stalk that she had spied in the rhubarb. “Spurge. Now you wash your hands after touching that. There’s a white sap under the leaves. Get it in your eye, you end up going blind.” And taking him by the wrist led the way deeper into her garden.
A different voice said threateningly: “I warn you, one more step…”
Alex hesitated. She had disappeared behind the dune–it was where they had made love–but he could hear her talking, in a voice of such kindness that he was willing to sacrifice his last breath in order to catch what she was saying. “With tomatoes, you give them a big scare. You put them in bad soil and they think they’ll have to seed or die, and then you pamper them like anything.”
Fingers tightened on the silver handle. “Don’t!”
At the sight of the blade, a rage balled up inside Alex to think of everything that he risked losing.
He rammed his knee into Kish’s groin.
Kish screamed, dropping the knife.
Alex snatched it up. And kneed him again, putting into his savage kick all the strength that he had saved up since childhood.
A table fell, and a glass and lamp–that stayed on, but spilling light elsewhere.
Smell of gin and burning peppermint gum and firelight flickering on Kish’s excruciated face. He was on his knees, burrowing and gasping for breath, his speech blurred like a prayer that he mumbled. “Why did you have to do that? Why?” In a bright red voice, he said: “I brought you your coin back. I thought you’d be pleased.”
Alex pressed the blade to his throat and sharply tugged back his head in the position of a wether selected for a mutton roast. If hate had permitted, he would have gouged out those eyes that stared back at him through his own spectacles.
“Listen carefully. Before you went away very suddenly that night, I had made up my mind that I wanted you to be here for a long time, that you could stay here, that you could live with us and we could adopt you, and perhaps give you a home you’d never had before. Don’t interrupt–because what I have to say to you is very tough. I want you to go now. And I don’t want you ever to come back, because Mrs Dove is returning tomorrow and it would upset her to see you. And now what’s happened has happened, it upsets me to see you here. I will repeat this one last time. It did take a while for me to accept, but I have decided to bring this baby up as my own. Have you got that, Kish? My own. Or is there something you wish to say?”
There was. And he was all set to say it, too, once he had got his breath back. He sucked in another quart of air and opened his mouth to speak.
And felt a coppery finger on his lips, shushing him.
He stared back at Alex with a glassy concentrated eye in which all the sea in the bay seemed suddenly to have collected. Because he was not seeing Alex. Vivid images flared inside his head. Birds flying. Oysters spawning. Dunes of sand. A sudden wind was streaming them one into the other, and he had the sensation that he himself was melting into the mix, part of an infinite and dazzling whiteness. The tinnitus buzzing and twittering died away and there was a great silence at his core. A fathering silence in which it dawned on Kish that it was not only the penny that he had to give back to Alex.
Those words that haloed the woman. He thought, then, that he understood. She was whispering it into his head.
So instead of saying, as he had been about to: “Your child is nothing to do with me, there’s no way in the world it could have been mine,” and revealing what he had witnessed through the schoolroom window, h
e stifled the denial that had been forming in his throat and stood awkwardly up.
“You know what, Mr Dove, the man who dropped me off here called me Blabbermouth. Actually, he’s going to collect me at 10 p.m. He had to do something and he dropped me and we’re going on. But before I go, I would like to say this. Whatever you saw, it’s not what you think. Nothing happened between me and Mrs Dove. Absolutely nothing. It’s you she loves. It’s yours, the baby. Whoever else’s could it be? It is yours.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
IN THE GOLDEN HOUR of dawn, when sails come out of the horizon, Alex launched the Zemmery Fidd into the river.
The young oysters that he had fed into the rotary grader were repacked and loaded, ready to be returned to the sea, and though, strictly speaking, another person ought to have been on board to assist, Jason’s girlfriend had arrived the previous afternoon and Alex saw no reason to disturb them.
There was a man sitting at the end of the jetty, fishing. He watched Alex start up the engines and bring the boat alongside. He had longish thinning hair and a white T-shirt.
Alex tied up, stepped onto the jetty.
“Wonderful to see so many oysters,” said the man, as if he had been waiting for him.
“They’re my wife’s,” recognising an English accent. He looked back at the lanterns on deck, each tray bulging with small shocked oysters, and felt a renewed pride in Merridy’s achievement. “She’s the oyster-grower.”
The man wrote something down in a lined notebook. Beside him, a fish flapped in a bucket.
“Guess how I caught that. Go on. Guess.”
The fish was flat and grey, with orange spots.
“I don’t know,” said Alex. He saw that the jetty was marked around like the fish with circles of orange lichen.
The man pointed his pencil at a large Pacific gull standing on the jetty. The gull was staring into the sun.
“That bird dropped it, so I took it off him. I think it’s a flounder. It was too big for him.”
Alarmed at the man’s propelling pencil, the gull shook open its wings and flew off low over the shore, where a white van was parked.
“Catch you later,” said Alex, straightening, and went to drive the tractor up from the water’s edge to the shed.
When he came back, the man was stripping in his line, preparing to leave.
“I’ve left some mussels in the water if you want live bait.”
“Thanks, mate,” Alex said, casting off the rope. “I’m not fishing today.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, Merridy’s red Toyota scrunched to a halt at the top of the drive.
The door on the driver’s side opened and Rusty jumped out and scampered onto the lawn to pee.
Alex watched his wife push herself from the car. He breathed out “Whoa!” at the size of her belly. She looked round, almost comical, and his heart swelled. It pressed with a sharp pain against his ribs, the fullness of his love for her and his tremendous need to protect their child, whatever it took.
She turned and saw him at the kitchen window and gave a small nervous wave. He lifted his hand, as when he had dropped the coin overboard, and then the knife, and observed them spinning towards the ocean floor, the darkness of seaweed and sand and shifting tides, and felt his anger purged. He remembered the lanterns like bodies floating. And how the sea that had delivered him to them, began to roughen, to whiten and toss like something alive.
He opened the fly-screen and ran to embrace her.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THIS IS A WORK of fiction and none of the characters are drawn from anyone in life. The town of Wellington Point does not exist any more than does Moulting Lagoon Farm or the Bilgola Mission. Nonetheless, I would like to thank the Melrose family, in particular Ian and Cass, for their unflagging goodwill and patience in educating me about oysters; John and Jo Fenn-Smith and Margaret Ann Oldmeadow, for details of farming life on Tasmania’s east coast; Murray Bail for his memories of Methodist dances. Jane Devenish-Meares for her forensic expertise; Michael Stutchbury, Adrian Caesar and Rachael Rose for comments on the text. I am grateful to the late Alan Gow for sharing his experiences as a coast-watcher in New Britain. I would like also to thank Niko Hansen, Jenni Burdon, David Scarborough, David Vigar, Dominic Turner, Jon Johnson and, as always, Gillian Johnson; and lastly my editor, Christopher MacLehose, for two decades of friendship, encouragement and support.
The stanza by A. D. Hope is from “Ascent into Hell”, written in 1943–44 and published in The Wandering Islands, (Edwards and Shaw, 1955), reproduced by arrangement with the licensor, The Estate of AD Hope c/-Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd.
The lines about black swans are taken from Chapter VI of My Home in Tasmania, by Louisa Meredith (reprinted by Sullivan’s Cove, Hobart, 1979).
The poem “What do you see, nurse?” is adapted from “A Crabby Old Woman”, by an anonymous Scottish woman, that first appeared in the Christmas edition of the News Magazine of the North Ireland Association for Mental Health.
The lines of Kenneth Slessor’s poem “Beach Burial” are taken from Kenneth Slessor: poetry, essays, war despatches, journalism, autobiographical material and letters, edited by D. Haskell (University of Queensland Press: St Lucia, 1991), reproduced courtesy of Paul Slessor.
I would also like to pay tribute to A Farm at the World’s End, by Thomas Dunbabin (Hobart, 1954) and The East Coasters, by Lois Nyman (Launceston, 1990).
About the Author
NICHOLAS SHAKESPEARE is the prize-winning author of five novels, and his work has been translated into twenty languages. He splits his time between England and Tasmania.
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PRAISE FOR
Secrets of the Sea
“I read it with complete absorption, wholly immersed in its world. It has a palpability and veracity which is quite mesmerising. A tremendous piece of work.”
—William Boyd, award-winning author of The Blue Afternoon and Restless
“Masterful…. Secrets of the Sea is the delicate account of [two lovers’] coming together and drifting apart…. Shakespeare has produced a work of rare beauty.”
—Financial Times
“Gripping…subtle but arresting.”
—The Times (UK)
“If he has not previously earned the right to be considered a world writer, this novel should confirm it…. A resonant fiction, affirmative and very human.”
—John Linklater, Sunday Herald
“A remarkable novel. It is brilliantly successful in portraying the forlorn, claustrophobic, gossipy, defiant little society in which it is set…. This latest work shows Shakespeare to be one of our dozen or so best.”
—Literary Review
“Engagement with the sea,…its significance in the unplumbed depths of human psyche, is the real, undoubted strength of this novel.”
—The Independent
“Carefully measured storytelling in this enveloping tale of life’s small treasures lost and found.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)
“An impressive, poignant piece of work.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“An astute portrayal of thoughtful characters…. Elegant and enjoyable.”
—The Spectator
“Nicholas Shakespeare has a magpie’s eye for shiny colloquialisms.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
“It reads absolutely true…. A very good novel indeed.”
—The Scotsman
PRAISE FOR
The Dancer Upstairs
“Riveting…. An intriguing, well-crafted, and powerful novel.”
—Washington Post
“Astoundingly good…. This dramatic, moving story demands you put your life on hold until it is finished.”
—The Guardian
“A beautifully crafted tale of love, obsession, and terror.”
—Baltimore Sun
“Enviably good, a genuinely fine novel from a writer who possesses real heart and flair.”
—Louis de Bernières, The Sunday Times (UK)
“A gripping literary thriller…. An unusually powerful examination of what animates the souls of those who choose—or are forced—to play upon the stage of history.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A crackling good yarn—Graham Greene meets Gabriel García Márquez.”
—The Evening Standard
“Shakespeare explores an explosive situation in Latin America, deftly mingling love and suspense in a powerful, persuasive narrative…. Precisely, beautifully detailed, a tale both faithful to its time and utterly timeless.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“In Nicholas Shakespeare’s novel of present-day Peru, where nothing is ever safe and people are almost never what they seem, tracking down a Marxist terrorist can make the labors of Hercules seem easy…. In The Dancer Upstairs, passion propels the main characters forward.”
—New York Times Book Review
PRAISE FOR
Bruce Chatwin
“Unimprovable (and unstoppably readable).”
—Pico Iyer, Time
“Moving and elegant…. A superb portrayal of the restless and randy travel writer brings us as close to his hidden heart as we’re likely to get.”
—Salon.com
“Shakespeare’s engrossing bio does exactly what Chatwin’s fans have longed to do: get beneath the alluring but elusive quality of his persona and prose. Grade: A.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Immensely readable…. Shakespeare portrays a man of colossal energies and intellect in perpetual conflict, whose life was a web of contradiction, controversy, and conundrum…. Shakespeare artfully synthesizes what could have been cacophonous voices into an impressively rendered and remarkably coherent portrait.”
—Vogue
“In Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin has found the right biographer. This is a magnificent work of empathy and detection.”
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