The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  * * *

  Later, in bed, I regretted it. Where would they go? Now that I had freed them? Would they float endlessly? Maybe they would travel the world, comet-like. They would bump against a surfacing whale or tap the snout of a turtle or be pummelled or cut by a tanker’s propeller. Or maybe they’d come to rest beneath a palm tree, far away. When I considered this, I felt sad, somehow. As if plastic had feelings, too.

  Also, I felt ashamed. I am so rarely angry; angry is not part of me and yet look at the rage I had felt and shown. Had I been seen? Slashing at them, swearing like that? Had someone on the coastal path looked down and seen me flinging the drums away? I’d thrown them like footballs, with both hands.

  I regretted it but it was done. I could not undo it. I could only learn from it, and understand grief better – the different shades and shapes to sudden, immeasurable loss. And to see it as a story, albeit a strange one: three plastic containers, a boat, a penknife and the absence of the man I had adored.

  Twelve

  Kitty went as the summer grew old. She wore dark glasses on the Morning Star so that no-one could see her sorrow – but I think Sam did. He knew the signs; he saw how she leant on the railings, looked down at the sea as if the sea could help. Others did not see it. Wasn’t she showing her work at a gallery? They assumed she was going there, for a day or so.

  It was me they talked of. No-one had seen me with the Fishman – with him, in a sense beyond being merely in his presence; but they knew. Leah, cleaning the windows, saw my blanket on Tavey’s bed; Milton glanced down to the pig farm one night, and saw me moving through it. Lorcan, too. He never mentioned it, not once, but I think he knew I lit candles in his church for other reasons now – for what had been, and what had been lost but also for what had been found.

  And Tabitha, of course. I’d stayed a second night with him, and a third, and on the morning after that the nurse came over to Tavey, sang out only me! I was embarrassed, at first. I thought she will judge – and I pulled on my shoes, hurried out. But I should have known that she was not the judging kind. Her smile did not have shadows. Later, on the quayside, she whispered I’m glad as she passed by. She looked proud of me, almost – as if a prize had been won.

  * * *

  At the lighthouse, Rona foams milk. She cuts a slice of chocolate cake and carries a tray outside. And normally, she would talk to the guests as she places the tray down or say here you are, brightly, at least – but not today.

  This morning, she heard from Nathan. It said two words: she’s gone.

  Rona had stared. She’d had to sit down. Gone? Actually gone?

  This is a day she has imagined for years. It is a day she has dreamt of since she was seventeen, when she first started wanting him – of their marriage ending, of Nathan being free. In her dreams, it ended easily. She imagined them agreeing, smiling, and Kitty saying go to her – to Rona. I know that you love her … And wishing him the best as he walked out the door. Foolish, of course. She doubts that it could ever happen that way. How had it happened? Did he tell her that he loves me? And did he watch as Kitty screeched, threw plates to the ground? Perhaps she fought. Perhaps she knelt, and begged for him to stay. Perhaps she threw back her hair, hardened her jaw and said I have never loved you anyway.

  She swallows. Which?

  Did he even tell her? Surely he told her.

  She replies to him: you told her about us, didn’t you? Puts the phone in her pocket, goes out into the sunshine with a plate of cherry scones.

  * * *

  Tabitha is in the mending room. It is cool, lavender-scented. Her cupboard doors are open and she counts out small white pills for Abigail. Blood pressure. It comes to us all, she thinks – old age. Or it does, if we are lucky. She tilts the pills into a brown bottle, labels it.

  A bang on the door. Where are you? Barked out.

  She finds her sister in the hallway. Yes?

  I have a question.

  Tabitha waits.

  I saw something. In fact, I keep seeing the same thing – three times now. Emmeline nods, lowers her voice. You know what I’m talking about.

  No I don’t.

  Oh, you do. Maggie. Leaving Tavey at first light. Is she staying the night with him, now? Your precious patient?

  I am not talking about this.

  No? A man who could be anyone at all? And Tom’s wife?

  She inhales, turns. Maggie is not his wife.

  Don’t you … Emmeline reaches. She takes her sister’s shoulder and pulls Tabitha around. Her face is red, puckered. There is a hardness in her eyes. Trust you to be like this.

  Like what?

  Not on my side! Never on my side …

  There aren’t sides to be on! How are there sides? I just want everyone to be happy.

  How noble. And Emmeline slams the door as she goes.

  Jim hears that slammed door.

  So does a rabbit. It darts into its burrow, its tail shouting white!

  And we do – we hear it. I am at Tavey. I am looking at the lips of the man with no name; I am pressing the soft, full pads of his mouth with my fingertips. We sit, and do not speak. But soon, he starts to smile. He smiles and I, in turn, start smiling and he reaches for my hand, moves my hand away.

  What? What is it?

  Ticklish, he says.

  Then the door slams. And when I step outside into the gorse and sun, I see her – Emmeline, walking away. She marches from Lowfield with her arms swinging.

  The Fishman comes beside me. Us?

  I think so.

  We watch her make her way past the church, up the lane.

  * * *

  When we were not together – talking, kissing, leaving a line of crumbs in the garden and watching the sparrows come – he was working. Tavey was now taking shape.

  Those boards which had been nailed over the windows meant that their frames were not too damp. A little, in places – but he shrugged, said they’ll be fine. No boards, however, had ever been nailed over Tavey’s front door: its wood was rotten, now. I could push my thumbs against its lower half and they would leave their thumb-shaped mark; its corners were blackened, and sponge-soft. It needed replacing. He also talked of shelves, skirting boards, a windowsill, a mantelpiece. I had never guessed a Fishman might know so much about wood.

  George heard of this. He came, knelt by that door and picked at it; he tapped his jawbone as he thought. A week later, and secretly, George met a man on the mainland and returned with booty: a secondhand front door with a rose made out of coloured glass and two dozen lengths of pale, fragrant pine. Called in a favour, he winked. Don’t ask. And I heard George spent a day at the pig farm, then – measuring the wood and marking it with pencil. Smoking in the gorse with a mug of tea, the pencil still behind his ear.

  Together, too, they hauled out the troughs. They dug into the ground and freed the old pigpens, making sure the honeysuckle stayed where it was. Bloody hell, said George, sweating. They’re heavier than they look … And as the light faded, the two men opened beer bottles and leant against the fence. It looked good – the garden, the secondhand front door.

  Thank you for your help.

  You’re welcome.

  But George was not the person who came to him the most.

  It was Leah. Little Leah – who was not little as such, but she had spent so long trying to take up less space on earth or staying indoors that she seemed to be small somehow. In the past, she’d been a feather as I had been a feather – drifting, existing and not saying much. But then she came to Tavey. She sanded down the woodwork. She boiled the kettle on the rickety stove. She found a loose floorboard and called the Fishman through. Here. Hear that? Smiling. She shifted her weight back and forth, back and forth so that it squeaked.

  * * *

  Tabitha walks on Lock-and-Key. She wears green trousers that billow in the wind; they make a snapping sound, like flags. She hears them, and the Fishman does; the nurse does not walk alone.

  She is not sure if she
suggested a long beach walk or if he did; it seems like it just happened. Emmeline had left, stamping footprints into the turf; Lowfield had shuddered with the slammed door. And Tabitha had made her rounds, bought milk, emptied her washing machine and even then – hours later – she still felt her home was shaking. Or maybe she was. That sister of mine …

  She took off her glasses, cleaned them. And when she put them back on, the Fishman was with her – standing in the kitchen, tilting his head. Tab? Are you … alright?

  So she knew he had heard the slammed door.

  Now they are here, and the northerly wind is so strong that she wants to close her eyes and lift her arms from her sides and feel it. She did this as a child. She’d climb onto the foghorn, straddle it and imagine that she was not her, not Tabitha, but a bird in flight. There is something about winds. They clean her, strengthen her.

  It was about me, wasn’t it?

  She nods. The two of you. Everyone knows, of course.

  She’s angry?

  She looks out to sea. Em is always angry.

  What I feel for Maggie –

  Oh! Tabitha touches him. Don’t stop or change because of Emmeline! Gosh, no. She shrugs. I doubt her anger is about you anyway.

  The wide, dark flatness of Lock-and-Key when the tide is out. There are whelks, limpets, cockle-shells, the leather straps of kelp. Wading birds hurry, at the water’s edge. Tabitha can see her reflection, in the sand – and she could live nowhere else, now. Not now.

  You don’t seem like sisters, he says. If you don’t mind me saying so.

  The nurse looks across at him, and up. In how we look? Same nose.

  Same nose, maybe. But I don’t mean that way.

  We aren’t close. Never were – not really. There’s seven years between us and that’s a big gap. She steps over channelled wrack, kicks through a length of blue nylon rope. It catches round her ankle and she leans down, pockets it.

  But seven years feel less as you grow older, don’t they?

  She smiles. You know a lot about the rest of us when you know nothing of yourself.

  But he is right. She knows he is right. Seven years was a lifetime, once. How do you play with a twelve-year-old girl when you are five? When you are finally twelve years old she is not twelve; she is nineteen and married and gone. There was barely the chance to be close to Emmeline. There were some moments but they were as brief and rare as a whale, cresting. And as lovely, too.

  She remembers tennis with her. They fashioned two rackets from planks of wood and hit a ball against the lighthouse wall. There was sunlight so that they were squinting. Emmeline had laughed, said good shot! When had that been? Had it happened at all?

  We fought. It is a confession. Tabitha leans in to him. We had one huge fight. About a man.

  Jack. The boy from Wind Rising. Tabitha noticed his ears before she noticed any other thing – ears that stuck out a little too much. She saw, too, there was dirt there – a line of it, as if it had been drawn. He never said much. He’d appear in the courtyard of the lighthouse-keepers’ cottages and squint, twist his toes into the dust. Jack’s here! Tabitha would shout it without moving, narrowing her eyes at this sullen boy. Why did he always visit them? She’d ask but she was never told. Once, and once only, Abelard said this: sometimes he needs a place to come. And so we’ll let him. Understand?

  Emmeline married a man called Jack Bundy and I didn’t like him. That’s all.

  Why not?

  He was … hard. A hard man. He threw stones at the gulls. The Bundy men had a reputation for being bad to their women and I worried for my sister.

  He looks at the sand as he walks, but glances across. You told her this?

  Not at first. She knew the rumours. And how do you reason with a woman who’s in love?

  She had literally bitten her tongue. As Emmeline walked down the aisle in a cream dress, Tabitha had taken her tongue and pressed her teeth down upon it to stop her saying what she felt in her bones which was this man doesn’t love you enough. Not as much as you love him. In the wedding photos, Tabitha looks sad. She could never hide what she felt, or not well: when she looks at the photographs it is her own sadness she sees.

  You were scared for her.

  Yes.

  And she missed her. There was that, too – that despite the seven years, the lighthouse was not the same with the empty single bed, the tea left in the teapot because it held enough for four mugs when there was only a need for three. Jack is her husband. And she is my sister – and so Tabitha would visit and make cakes for her, and when their first baby arrived – Ian, with his milky smell and squawking mouth – Tabitha had been so amazed, so filled with sudden, tender love that she embraced her sister, or tried to. An awkward, clumsy hug.

  On my eighteenth birthday I went down to see her when she hadn’t been expecting me. She was nursing Hester – Hester must have been a month or two months old – and I saw the bruising. She said she’d fallen after the birth – weak, tired …

  You argued then?

  Not then. I took her word for it. But later – just a few weeks later – I went back round and she had a cut up in her hairline. An inch long. It had crusted, by that point – but it must have bled very badly … That’s when we argued. I was leaving for the mainland a few days later and I was scared of leaving her. I said some things …

  How easily it happens. The words spill out and cannot be retracted. She speaks as freely now as she had shouted, all those years ago – words like tyrant and bully, and you are blind! Blind! Tabitha had raged so that Hester had wailed, and Ian had come downstairs with frightened eyes and a thumb in his mouth to see his aunt saying what of the children! You think it will only be you? Are you mad? And then it came – the slap from Emmeline. A slap that sounded like a gunshot.

  I think I called him a bastard. Worse still, most likely. I told her that she would be a bad mother if she stayed and I had no right to say that. I was eighteen …

  Yes, how easily it happens. How easily, too, the years join up like daisy chains or beads of blood in water so that it looks like one long cloud of it. How easily one’s own life takes over – Tabitha’s studies, her friendships, her own beating heart and, later, her nursing in parched desert countries all swept the years away until it felt too late to sit down with Emmeline and talk about that slap of the hand and those hot words. By the time Tabitha came back to Parla for good she was thirty-two. The argument had been nearly half her lifetime ago, separated from her adult self by famine and disease and love that hadn’t worked out, and many small tragedies – so that their fight had felt too distant to go back to. They were not the same people. Tabitha was jaded, trailing her loss; Emmeline was the mother of four and tougher than Jack, now. Sealed up like a clam.

  But you still feel it.

  She nods. Hard not to. I have sat here for three decades and watched my sister try to hide what she was told was love when it was not love at all. How was that love? What a waste …

  They come to the end of the beach. There is foam that the wind finds, and it skitters. To her right she can see their footprints; two of hers for each one of his. So tall. So good to walk beside.

  It isn’t too late. Nothing’s too late.

  She shakes her head. Too much time has passed.

  I don’t believe that.

  She is angry with me. She’s an angry person.

  Not fully.

  Tabitha looks up. How can we still not know your name? You must know it. You must, by now.

  He says nothing, looks pained.

  I know you have your reasons. I guess we all have our reasons. Emmeline made her choice and that’s just how things are.

  On the beach, they talk of other things. They crouch amongst the weed – the emerald sea lettuce, the bladderwrack that shines like bottle-glass. She is happy. It’s good to see her happy – and Tabitha means Maggie. He knows who she means.

  Yet when the nurse goes to bed that night it isn’t the weed she thinks of. She does not t
hink of the shell that she saw him pick up, and keep.

  It is of time passing. It is of the grandfather clock in the hallway that has counted every minute of every hour for the past two hundred years or more. It is of too much time slipping by to ever make a difference to how she and Emmeline speak to each other, or act. How many years? Half a century since Tabitha shouted you’re a bad mother in front of young Ian, and far worse things – if you don’t leave him … Huge declarations from a child – a child – who knew nothing of love or how the heart works. There is no excuse – there is never that. But whereas Tabitha, at eighteen, could not comprehend the staying put, the choice to stay at Wind Rising and make two more sons with a man like Jack, she can understand much better now. Time has passed indeed, she sees that much. Love may have darted through Tabitha’s nets, or mutual love at least, and she has not had children but she has seen enough to know what matters and what does not. They are not young – not these days. She would not say old, but she and Emmeline are not young and one day their names will be carved onto stones in the graveyard where their parents are and that will be their lives done with, and gone. They will only be names and a story or two. And what then? That’s when it’s too late – then and not before. And Emmeline may hiss and she may have spat out don’t you dare when Tabitha had tried to comfort her in the hours after Tom had gone but the Fishman had said she is not fully angry … He’d said it quietly. He’d talked to Tabitha as a parent might – and, she sees, he had been right.

  Anger is Emmeline’s veil. Just as she had worn a wedding dress, all those years ago, so Emmeline wears her anger now. She dresses up in it. But it is thin. It is gauze-like and it can be pulled aside. I will pull it aside.

  They are sixty-five and seventy-two but they are also the girls who played tennis with planks of wood against the lighthouse wall. They shared teacakes. They hung their Christmas stockings, side by side.

  It’s never too late.

  And if a widow can find love again, she can find the sister who used to give her piggybacks, who showed her how a guillemot’s egg is tapered so that it can never fall from its ledge; it only rolls back round to its starting place.