‘Some old barn or shed, out of people’s sight and hearing. Think about it, Bet.’
‘Don’t be daft, Mam – this is Naseby! Don’t you remember their wedding day, both of them so happy? He said it was all his dreams, ever since he played at house with us, out above Six-Mile—’
I stopped, and we stared at each other.
‘Stony Cottage,’ said Mam, and we both knew it was true.
We cut across to the Crescent road, all but tumbling slantwise down the field; the cows were like islands and we ran across the grassy sea between them, the stony. Once on the road we put our heads down and strode, not speaking. I didn’t want to believe it, but if Mam did, how could it not be true? But Naseby, my big sweet-tempered brother? ‘How could he bring himself to be so cruel to Sophie, and little Tom and Myrtle?’
She put her hand on my arm. ‘We don’t know yet. We don’t know exactly and for certain. Wait and see.’
The north road swung up over the cliff almost gaily, and we walked it up into the teeth of the wind, and it battered our hair and flapped our coat-collars. The sea on our left tossed moon-twinkles about, rushed and smashed at the cliffs, drummed in the road underfoot. The hill to the right was a different sea, charcoal-grey; all its sproutings blew against the stones; the two hawthorns on its top leaned worried by the wind. Then the road dropped away and Crescent Corner lay like a fallen moon eating up its own light, and beyond was the smaller, messier cove, where the caves were.
Around the top of Crescent we strode. ‘I used to come here as a girl,’ Mam cried to me, ‘and walk about, and dream of running away. I thought I could make anything of myself, back then. Rollrock felt so puny! I was after something better and brighter.’ Her teeth flashed in the moonlight. ‘And then I mistook Odger for that thing – he was better and brighter, to begin with, while we courted. But he did not stay that way, and after a time I could not revive it in him, and the rest has been the same dull round-and-round that you know of so well.’
We nearly missed the little path beyond the Crescent cliffs. It looked as if it led off into nothing, that path, into a last step out into night air and then, after a gasp and half a scream, into the swill and rock-forest below. But no, it ducked in under a lip of rock there, and along and along, then down and doubling back it wove – so constricted that Mam used hardly to be able to fit down, following our tiny feet to cram herself into Stony Cottage with us and pretend to sip a cup of sea-water tea and nibble the edge of a sand-and-weed cake.
‘I will show that Odger,’ Mam said as we followed the grey thread of path all around Cave Cove, the wind swiping at us like a cat’s-paw at a mousehole, never quite hooking us out.
We crept up on the mouth of the cave we’d called Stony Cottage. I rather hoped we would find it empty, for then we could use it ourselves, to get out of the weather awhile. But just as Mam was about to poke her head around and look in, the wind dropped for a moment, and in that moment Naseby cried out, all strained and joyful, ‘God, woman, what are you doing to me!’
Mam stepped across to the mouth, her hand back so as I wouldn’t follow and see. ‘She’s doing what your wife Sophie ought to be doing, I dare say.’
A dreadful silence fell in there. A girl’s voice questioned, but the wind blew up and stopped my hearing the words.
‘Come on out, laddy-boy,’ Mam said. ‘You’ve a wife and babs after your company.’
Nase said something.
‘Where else would you be?’ she said. ‘Where else is there to hide?’ I was glad she didn’t give me the credit for having guessed the place.
Then he was there, pale, naked, bending over her in the black entrance, a clump of clothes hiding his boy-bits. ‘Mam, Mam, you won’t tell, will you? Mam, I can put her back. Right away, right now. Her cast is just up over the meadow. No one need know. Sophie need never know.’
‘Please, Naseby Winch,’ said the girl, her voice all pleasant music. ‘Let me go home. My sisters will miss me.’
‘Dress yourself,’ Mam said to Nase. ‘And you? I suppose you’ve no more than that blanket, to make you decent?’
‘She can put her skin on, Mam! She can be gone! I shall run and fetch it.’
‘You won’t,’ said Mam. ‘It does not suit my purposes. Here, she can wear my petticoat.’
She stepped into the cave, and I moved forward and looked in. Nase was excruciated, cringing there, shivering, his back to me, his skinny backside – what was that wife feeding him? The seal-girl was seated on the blanket, watching my mam work her petticoat out from under her skirt. She looked quite un frightened, and very beautiful, and the smell! Like a summer sea, it was, a breeze off living salt water, a waft of warmth, while all else was echoes of the cold noising sea.
Mam held out her petticoat. ‘There you go. That will wrap you more than once, such a mouse you are.’
‘Mam!’
‘Come along now, come along.’
‘Mam!’
‘Too late, Naseby. Don’t waste breath begging.’
‘Please, though!’
‘It’s time, my lad, to face the size of what you’re doing. It’s more than a dally in this cave-house, lad. It’s more than a hot moment between this lady’s legs. There’s me, you see, and Sophie, such as she is that you married her. There’s Tommy and Myrtle, hanging off your loyalty. Throwing you in, assuming you feel any shame, that’s five at least people in this town that will never lift their heads again, because of the ridiculous picture you’ve just painted before me.’
‘All the more reason, then—’
‘All the more reason to dress, boy!’
The seal-girl stood, tall and not trying to cover anything of herself. ‘If you would only give me my coat,’ she said reasonably, to Naseby, to Mam. She even cast me an appealing look, before Mam put the petticoat over her head.
She did not fight or protest; she watched as Mam pulled the petticoat down, manoeuvred her arms free of it, then brought it up to tie under her arms. ‘She is like a doll,’ I said. ‘She just lets you.’
‘Oh, they’ll go where they’re pushed, these women, if there’s no prospect of escape to animate them towards the sea. No wonder the menfolk like them. Pah, you’re swimming in this dress, girl! Well, you will just have to swim.’ She tied the ties ferociously tight. ‘Come, then.’
‘You are taking us to Sophie?’ said Nase frightenedly, buttoning his pants.
‘I am taking you to Dad.’
‘What for?’
‘You go,’ Mam told him at the door. He went, and Mam ushered the maid out, the petticoat blowing up around her, giving us a fine view of her neat bottom and long legs, her tiny feet hardly showing ahead of her ankles.
‘What does Dad need to know for?’ Naseby bellowed back to Mam along the rock wall.
‘I’ve to prove to him. I said this would be the way of it and I’ve to show him.’
A long argument came out of his mouth. Some of it blew over his shoulder to us, the rest broke against the rocks or was swept up the cliff by the wind. ‘– telling – Sophie – anyway—’
‘Move along, the both of you. I want my supper.’
All the way home Nase pled and complained. Mam didn’t answer him; he seemed to have taken himself beyond her caring; this time she would not come aiding him.
After a while the girl caught him up and took his hand. I thought he might have the decency to throw her off in disgust at himself, but he clutched the hand as he walked unsteadily on.
‘My eldest,’ Mam muttered beside me. ‘You think they are gems and pearls, your little ones; you pour yourself into them, watch them grow, wait for them to make you proud. And then all of a sudden they are just as besmutched and low-motived as everyone else, and worse than some of the Potshead people you’ve always despised. The bab you carried and bore and fed tosses away your good name for a night or two’s tumbling in Stony Cottage with Miss Long-Limbs here, Miss Moves-Like-Enchantment. Look at her! She’s finer in my petticoat than I was in my wedding dr
ess.’
I walked alongside Mam’s disgust, in a daze myself, across the town. Nobody met us; Naseby looked aside at each house, though, cringing at who might come out, or who might pull aside their curtain, hearing our steps in the street.
We came to our door. ‘Go on,’ Mam told Naseby, when he hesitated.
‘Please, Mam? I will take her back. I will find her coat and—’
‘Lift the latch, Nase. It’s too late for any of that now.’
‘Curse you, Mam,’ he said nearly weeping.
‘Curse yourself, boy. You brought this down entirely on yourself.’
He opened the door and we went in. It was so quiet inside, so warm! I closed the door behind us and we were stiff-still, all three of us. The front room was empty, the fire low; Dad must have sent the boys to bed and gone to do work out the back. Naseby wrung the seal-girl’s hand. The girl, the nameless girl, radiated beauty there; our house looked like the house of peasants, and Mam and even Nase looked wrinkled, reddened, worn out from rough living, peasant work and the endless scouring of the wind.
Mam took off her coat and handed it to me.
‘Excuse me.’ She edged around Nase and the girl. Through to the kitchen she went; there was the scrape of a bowl taken from the shelf, the clack of ladle in the pot of kale-broth we had had for supper; Mam liked to see us all fed and then be left in peace to her own meal. ‘Odger?’ she called out. The bowl clunked to the table, the spoon rang down beside it, a chair was pulled out and sat in. I realized how motionless we were, here in the front room, and tried to break the spell, hanging up Mam’s coat, and then my own.
Dad came in the back door. ‘What do you want, woman!’
Mam must have made some gesture, for he filled up the doorway there, came out to us. His face as he stepped into the room? He knew. He had known all along.
He saw me realize, my face between the two faces. ‘Where did you find them?’ he called back down the hall.
Mam gave no answer but a pointed clink of her spoon in her bowl.
‘Where did she find you?’ he said to Nase.
‘Cave Cove,’ he said.
‘Anyone see you, coming here?’
Naseby shook his head.
Dad would have said more, if I’d not been there. Instead, he started back along the hall, turned to make some reassuring sign to Nase, saw me again and was gone into the kitchen. Leaning on a chair-back, his shoulders around his ears, he spoke a word to Mam.
‘No,’ she said.
He spoke louder. ‘There’s still a way. Nobody saw you, Nase says—’
‘Sophie must be told,’ Mam said. ‘And I don’t care who else. I really don’t, Odge. It’s time Naseby faced his follies. And time you admitted his uselessness.’
I realized I did not want to leave the front room, which was full of the seal-girl’s wonderful wild smell. It was as if the whole ocean had pooled in here, fish and saltwater, weed and whale, sea-birds slicing through the fresh air above. Could a girl fall under a seal-girl’s spell? A little knifing of fear cut me free and I forced myself up the hall to the kitchen doorway, to the comforting sight of Mam eating supper, perhaps tireder-looking than usual, but to all other appearances living through an ordinary evening.
Dad twisted in his chair to look over his shoulder. ‘Go to bed,’ he said, as if it were the last straw for him to see me.
Mam glanced at me unperturbed. ‘She may as well hear; they may as well all know. Wake up your sister, Bet. Get the boys out.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ snapped Dad.
‘And then go out in the street and bellow it about town. Tell all creation.’
Dad’s shoulders sank and he shook his head and turned back to deal with her. While they looked hatred at each other I slid forward into the kitchen, and peered back along the hall to see if Nase would bring his girl through.
But no. I had never seen two people so close-wound together; certainly I’d never seen Nase hold to Sophie so.
‘Look,’ said Dad to Mam behind me, as if he were bringing a whole new complexion of sensibleness to the conversation. ‘Look, he knows he’s done wrong, the lad – you’ve only to look at him. She can be gone by morning, and all this over, his lesson learned.’
‘And Sophie never know,’ said Mam in a dead voice.
‘And Sophie never know!’ he said, as if that would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?
‘Just you, and I, and Nase, and Bet there know.’
‘Just us! And we would never tell—’
‘And Nase when you fill him with kickwater, and his whole soul falls out his mouth onto the table – who would know then? Who would be standing by?’
‘That need not happen, Nance. I’m telling you, he knows the enormity of it—’
‘And this one?’ She nodded at me. ‘When all the girls are sharing secrets and she has this juicy one to share? Who’ll be there? What other little gabmouths?’ I was insulted, but she was right – she knew us girls and what went on among us.
‘Then tell her not to, Nance. Impress upon her. I’m telling you, none of this need happen!’
‘Well, I’m not sitting twitching the rest of my days, hoping it won’t, are you? Oh, you are, I can tell, you fool.’
‘What are you saying? That we bring Sophie down here to see?’
‘Did I say that?’
‘Should we troop up there, then – is that what you want? Him and her and – I don’t know, all of us? You want Geedre and the lads to come too?’
‘Nor that, did I say. All I said is, Sophie must be told. I don’t care how you go about it, but I’ll not have this hidden. That’s my part played. Sort it out yourselves from here.’ And her spoon moved in the broth, rang again against the bowl.
Dizzy from the scent of the seal-girl, I went and leaned in the mouth of the hall. I closed my eyes and they all melted into the sea-smell: Geedre flat as a sleeping fish on the other side of that wall; Dad and Mam either side of the table, which was like a slab of rock or the side of a sunken ship; Nase and his girl there like two twined strands of sea-ribbon, tilted in the flow. I opened my eyes before I should drown, and there was the house again, walls and air, the tintype hanging there of Great-Grandmother Winch, in her baskety chair, just as cross as ever.
Now Dad almost spat. ‘You sit there so smug.’ I had never heard that thickness in his voice. Fright blossomed up my spine. Would he strike Mam? I had heard of dads who did hit mams. I turned in the doorway so as I should be ready to run forward and grab him if he tried.
‘Nothing smug about me,’ said Mam calmly. ‘Do you think that pleases me?’ She tore bread, ate a piece.
‘Stuffing your face,’ said Dad.
‘I was hungry,’ she said around the bread, as if she didn’t notice how far she had pushed his temper. ‘I was hungry before I set out.’
‘You don’t know everything,’ he said quietly.
‘Did I say I did?’
‘You acted like it. You always do. You think you are so sharp? You think we’re fools, me and Nase, that can hide nothing from you?’
‘Well, Nase has done a poor job, certainly.’ She was not afraid at all. Perhaps she did not care if she goaded him to hitting her?
Dad growled; after a moment I heard the words in it: ‘You would shame our son, would you?’ His voice was squashed from him hunching over at Mam.
She did not lean or shrink from him. ‘He has shamed himself, in my book.’
‘And would you shame me the same?’ He brought his palms to the tabletop, his shoulders up around his ears again.
She gave a little laugh. He had unsettled her. A short silence passed. ‘If you did the same as him, you would shame yourself, the same.’
He pushed himself up from the chair like a spider launching itself high onto its legs, and sidled around the table. He wore a joyless grin; he looked entirely a stranger. He caught Mam’s arm above the elbow. I cried, ‘Let her be!’ and leaped to her side and took her other arm.
But, ‘Hush.
’ Mam watched him, and rose from her seat, and went where he drew her, slowly, resisting him, but going with him still. I held to her, and followed.
He forced us, crept us, through the scullery, out the back door, from the dim warm lamplight into the moon’s bright frosting of everything. We crossed the moony flags to his tool shed. He let go of Mam, and I went close and held her, shivering. My father, eyes wide and teeth bared, opened the shed and backed into it.
Some weeks back, he had built a cupboard against the side wall. I had watched him build it. The door opened to the back of the shed; I had told him how foolish it was. It cuts off all the light, I’d said. You’ll never find anything in there! He had only smiled and done as he pleased, and now I saw why. He had only ever intended keeping a single object in this new safe place, and he needed no light to find it. Now he reached in, and drew that thing out among us by its narrow white hand.
‘Come out, Helena-Grace,’ said Dad, his voice softening, saddening. Mam jolted and trembled; I held her tighter and tighter. I squeezed my eyes shut, as if by not seeing the woman emerge, I could make her not be there. The summer-sea smell rolled out the shed door; Mam gasped, and so did I, at the loveliness of it, at the awfulness.
‘We can close this now,’ said Dad to his sea-maid. ‘You need never go back there.’
Now it seemed cruel to hide my eyes and make Mam endure the sight alone; as well, the smell promised cleansing, and horizons, and sky, a flying-out from this, a floating-out, an altogether larger, fresher way of living than we’d so far been cramped up in. I looked around in hope as much as in horror.
Side-on to us, Dad kept grinning, kept eating up Mam’s distress. The sea-maid watched us more calmly. One breast announced itself through the fall of her hair; a patch of blackness sprouted at her cleft, as unconscious as the breast of how it should be private. She was narrowly built, yet what curves she had were full, and her narrows were beautiful too, her wrists and hands, her ankles, her neck. Her face was as lovely as that other’s, Nase’s girl’s, and just as unaware of what it was doing to our Mam, to our family; she looked out on us with the same shy lack of enmity or vanity, expecting neither harm nor welcome from us, and needing nothing. I wished I was her, in this little group of us, rather than myself clinging to my mam, rather than my dad waiting gleeful and horrified for Mam’s rage to crash down, rather than Mam herself, shuddering in my arms like a lidded pot on the point of boiling and gushing over, drowning the fire beneath it.
The Brides of Rollrock Island Page 10