The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  They stand like strangers. Then Rona softens – a rush of want, and relief, and she drops the tablecloths and comes towards him. She runs her hands down his back, presses her waist against his waist. Where have you been? I’ve been trying to see you. Talk to you. Is your phone broken? Is it Emmeline? She pushes herself onto her tiptoes, tries to find his mouth with hers.

  He turns his head. Let’s go inside.

  Yes. Yes.

  Inside, Rona studies his face – the brown eyes, the scar by his eye. There are the clear signs of a beard and she knows how it would feel against her chin. He has left her red-coloured, in the past; she has lain, burning from him.

  I’ve texted, and called … I’ve been to High Haven twice and you weren’t there. Are you trying to be casual? So nobody can guess? Did Kitty –

  Rona.

  Did you tell her? You must have told her?

  Rona. Sharper.

  She hears him.

  I didn’t tell Kitty. She left of her own accord. She left me.

  She did? Isn’t that … good?

  No. He almost smiles as he says this. He sighs, shakes his head. No, it isn’t good. Rona, this has to stop now. You and me.

  She stands, does not blink. Inside her, there is nothing – as if stunned, or scooped out; she feels numb. His words don’t make sense.

  It has to … We both know it’s been the wrong thing. Such a wrong thing.

  No, she breathes. Not wrong.

  It’s over. Must be.

  A deep, animal noise from her, now. Why? Why now? Kitty’s gone! What’s to stop us?

  Because it isn’t right, Rona. I still – he sighs, winces – I still love Kitty.

  But you love me too! I know you do!

  Rona, you are beautiful. You are bright and kind and it is a lucky, lucky man who’ll be with you one day. But it won’t be me. It can’t be me.

  It will be you. It will be you … She grits her teeth.

  Jesus, Ro. I am so sorry. Those weak words. Those words that never sound enough.

  Rona turns, grips her hair. In her head she is thinking how could he? How could he? Doesn’t he know? Surely he knows – how she has doodled Rona Bundy on her recipes, folded down the corners of bridal magazines, how she could pick him out of a crowd of a thousand people just by the shape of his ears or shade of his hair or by his scent alone. Doesn’t he feel even half of it? Doesn’t he, also, look at the place where her mouth has been – the side of a mug or a bottle’s neck – and want to put his own mouth there? She does. She has done – with his old teacups. She has placed a fork of his into her own mouth. She has kept the pillow case that he has slept upon – breathed into, rubbed his thick hair against – unwashed and at her bedside, and she has read romance novels in which she thinks this man is nothing like Nathan and how the writer has marked down love is, thinks Rona, nothing like this love, my love for him; and she had made plans in her head, for so long – she washes her hair on Saturday so that it might be at its shiniest on Sunday, in case he comes when the others are in church, and she has seen Nathan in a dark-red shirt so that Rona has also bought dark red – scarves, a dress, a lace bra – because he must, surely, like the colour? And now he stands here saying it’s not right as if it’s meant nothing, as if it’s been a minor event in which no-one had feelings or hopes or proper wishes, and Rona turns back round and says you bastard.

  Ro –

  You love her? Then what have I been? Just fun? A hobby? Did you think it would be rude to turn me down?

  No, Rona –

  Don’t you … She grabs a tea-towel. With the tea-towel, she hits the side of him – soft, useless strikes with a floury cloth so that a whiteness is left on his sleeve. Flour rises into the air – and he lifts his arms, tries to protect himself against this snapping cloth. He starts to step back. She follows him saying you used me as she strikes him.

  Rona –

  She is crying. Nathan blurs and shimmers. Her eyes spill and she throws the tea-towel away, pushes at him. You lying piece of …

  One hard push. She throws her weight against him.

  He takes her wrists, says stop –

  But Rona flings her arms out of his grip – a roar, and a vast, angry gesture of speed and defiance which means that her right arm frees itself, touches air and nothing else, but her left arm, when it breaks free from him, smacks back into the wall – or rather, not the wall but a canvas called West-Facing so that there is the brief, tight, echoless sound of a puncture, a tear. The sound stops them both. Both Rona and Nathan stand still. They watch as West-Facing tilts left, tilts right, and falls – slowly, impossibly slowly – onto the café floor.

  It lands face down. A single pat.

  Oh God.

  They drop to their knees – both of them do. They bend over the painting as if it were a living thing, injured, and their hands are careful with it so they don’t hurt it further. We need to turn it over, Nathan says. He takes hold of one side. We’ll tilt it. OK?

  They turn it, lift it up.

  Rona’s eyes scan the canvas until she finds what she knows is there. A tear – or two tears that join each other. She takes her finger, touches it. Oh …

  What? Where is it?

  It is in the bottom left-hand corner. It is a fractured piece of light amongst the darkly painted land. It is white bone showing through the black, glossed vibrancy of muscle or skin and they sit, thinking, with their breath slowing down from the effort of the fight and it is Nathan who speaks, now.

  It was wrong to you, too. When I say it’s the wrong thing to do I don’t just mean for Kitty.

  She sniffs. Shut up.

  Rona stares at the wound. It is small and yet enormous; tiny and yet so conspicuous that it’s all she can see. She prods it. Then she moves her finger behind it, finds that if she presses the tear from behind she can close the tear up, so that the land is fully dark again.

  I could put tape there. Look.

  Will it mend it? Enough?

  A shrug. I’ll drop its price a little. Waive my commission.

  You won’t tell?

  Rona looks at him. She looks at him hotly – hating him. Or hating, maybe, that there has always, always, been three of them. It is not a revelation; it is not a sudden clarity: Rona has always known that it has never been simply her and Nathan on their own. There were three of them with each kiss, three of them in the bedroom, three of them now on the café floor. Always three. Like the bloody lighthouse-keepers’ quarters there was always three of everything – and Rona sees that so clearly. She has tried to strip away the long-haired woman with jewellery and her Miss Dior scent, to clear herself of Kitty, but the act of doing this meant that Kitty was, invariably, there. She was in the tick of a clock, the crunch of car tyres outside. In every movement her husband made.

  You’re a coward. And a liar. She says this quietly.

  West-Facing. They both look at it but it is Kitty that they see. Her girlish applause when she hears a canvas has been sold.

  I never meant to hurt you. Truly –

  Well … She looks around, as if to show him what the truth is: a girl crouched on a tiled floor with a torn painting and tear-stained face. Good job. Well-handled.

  Nathan stands. There are no words to say. All the words are done.

  He goes home. He is nauseous, exhausted and he sits down on the bathroom floor with one elbow on the loo seat. You bastard, she had called him. And yes, he thinks. Yes.

  He vomits, then. He leans back against the wall.

  Then he folds back over the loo, vomits a second time.

  Why? Why, for God’s sake? How had it happened for eight months or more? It had never been wanted – not by him. Not wanted even slightly. It has only ever been Kitty he has wanted, or loved.

  He sits back, shuts his eyes. Rona had been nothing more than another islander until that afternoon in his Land Rover, eight months ago, when she’d clambered over to his side, pressed her hand against his crotch. I could make you feel better.
If you’d let me. And it had felt – what? Christ, it had felt dreadful – painful, violent, destructive. And it felt fitting, somehow. Her mouth pushed against his mouth made his stomach tighten as it tightens now, in sickness; his head had thought no and his hands had lifted up as if defending himself but, palms out, they had only rested against her which had made her strengthen even more. He’d thought I deserve this: the sickness. The endless gnaw of guilt. It was the punishment that he’d been expecting; it was the warranted outcome for having failed (he always fails) his little brother three years and two months before. It was justice, even. For this is Nathan’s understanding of this brutal, unrelenting world: when you err or let down others, you are reprimanded. When you burn the last of the bread in the toaster you deserve the hard push in the jaw, by a hand. When you are slow to shear, or nick a sheep with the blades so that it bleeds and struggles against your knees, you deserve the kick it gives you, and the bruise that follows it – yellowish, and sore. When you bend a wire fence, you are struck; when you spill a pail of water on the floor you are sworn at – bloody useless boy … And therefore when the person you vowed to love and protect since his birth dies, so that you’ve failed him, you should expect a punishment that is worthy of that failing. I let him down. I wasn’t there when he needed me. I could not reach out a hand or dive in, also. And so did Nathan seek it? Crave the punishment, almost? Did he seek the worst of punishments, in keeping with his crime? And if so, what was it? That might bring him the greatest sorrow? It was losing Kitty. Nothing else came close.

  Katherine.

  He wants her back so much; it is like not having air, or not enough air. Each movement is harder.

  He sits. Stares at the wall.

  Nathan wants to be held, at that moment. He wants Kitty to stroke his hair and say hush, now … Or he wants the firm embrace that Tom used to give, with both of them slapping the other man’s back and him, Tom, groaning with the effort of this huge, important, never-ending hug.

  * * *

  I spent the day in Pigeon. Not at sea – not sailing. Just in her, as she was moored. I folded her tarpaulin and laid it down upon her; this tarpaulin became my sleeping place. She rocked with the tide. She smelt of Tom and goodness, and I thought of him beneath me – far, far beneath me. The bones I used to see under his skin when he stretched.

  I understood this, as I lay there: that I loved the Fishman. And if you love a person, you wish them to be happy. You wish them to be the best that they can be. He needs to go – and yes I would be sad; yes, I would sit in Tavey and touch the things that he had touched, and want him back so badly. And the days would feel less than they had done – by far. But I want him to be happy.

  He had to return to the place he had come from; he was not yet done with it. He had never quite stopped calling sea, sea, in the night – and maybe, in turn, he was also being called for. Maybe his old life was singing his name; not Fishman, but his proper name.

  * * *

  In the evening, she does not clear the tables; she does not put the saucepans to soak in the sink.

  Rona tends to the injured West-Facing. She sits on the floor with her legs splayed and the canvas by her side. She has tape and glue, and she is gentle. Rona holds her breath as she mends it – pushing the torn parts of the canvas back into place, holding them there with her finger as she makes sure the edges meet exactly.

  She smoothes on tape. Dabs at it.

  There is nothing, she thinks, I can do, now.

  She returns the canvas to the wall, and stands back. Rona has done her best with it; she wishes she had never flailed her arms at all and that she’d never damaged it but she has done the best she could. You can’t tell. The tear cannot be noticed; West-Facing will still sell and Kitty need never be told of what happened here – that it was damaged by Rona, and that it fell. What good would it do?

  Rona does what she has not done for months.

  She climbs into her purple car and drives down to the harbour. She knocks on the door of the harbourmaster’s house.

  Her mother answers the door with her reading glasses on, and her face lights up. Hello, darling! Are you hungry? We’ve just eaten but there’s plenty left … Rona follows her back into the kitchen where the washing machine talks to itself, and there is the smell of casserole, and Nan’s felt-tips and crayons are strewn about the floor. And when the tears come, Dee says nothing. She merely goes to her daughter and holds her.

  Mum, I’ve been so stupid …

  Shh, now … There.

  Rona doesn’t say why. She doubts she will ever say why – or at least not to her mother. How could she tell her parents what she is crying for? But Dee doesn’t ask her. She only offers supper, a long bath with lavender oil and a glass of red wine, and when Nancy comes downstairs she shows Rona her best headstand in a way to cheer her up – and it helps. It all helps. Only a little but it does.

  By candlelight, he waits. He cracks his knuckles, waits for her. Hopes for her.

  She comes. Of course she comes.

  She steps through the door, pauses for a moment. Then Maggie takes his hand, leads him to the bedroom where they lie as if one creature – arms and legs looped like rope. They only count the seconds between each sweep of milk-white light.

  I looked for you. I couldn’t find you.

  I was on Pigeon.

  I was worried …

  Why?

  That you didn’t believe my story. Or that it changed how you felt about me.

  She looks up from his chest. How could it do that?

  He strokes her hair. She kisses him – she kisses the mouth that she knows, now, has swallowed saltwater; she kisses the eyelids that have made saltwater of their own. I know that you have to go.

  I don’t want to leave you.

  I don’t want that either. But you must.

  Oh, she knows. She understands it – better than he does, even. She had only ever guessed at the cause of the round, dark scar on the flesh of his hand; she’d imagined the bite of a silver hook or the clamping down of an angry claw. And she had not understood these ways of injury. But the truth? Now that she has learnt it, Maggie knows that he has a long, long way to go. He has many miles to swim – more than he imagines. He, like the Fishman, cannot stay on Parla; for his skin would crack, and his heart would turn to dust.

  He has a journey and he must make it.

  I must stand on a quayside, smile and let him go.

  * * *

  In the waters off Lock-and-Key, there is the single puff of whale’s breath – a spray, and a settling. The whale’s back is a firm, bright, black-shiny back that has been through the deepest of waters and has surfaced into the starriest nights.

  Does it come for the Fishman? Is it waiting?

  I don’t have the answer.

  I am looking at my fingers, which are locked between his fingers. It is him and it is me – in our little world of two.

  * * *

  The wind strengthens that night. It grows, so that the sea off Sye is whiter and that bathroom vent at Wind Rising is louder, much louder.

  The Fishman notices this wind. He rises from his sleep, listens.

  As for Abigail, she is going downstairs the next morning when she pauses, stiffens. Jim? Are the bells louder?

  Yes, he replies.

  Still northerly?

  Still northerly. Just much stronger, now.

  Nathan finds his brother in the barn. Ian is standing but tucked over, one hand pressed against his chest so that Nathan pauses and then quickens his step. Ian?

  He does not look up. Bloody shears. The catch has gone on one of them, and it sprang open …

  The slice is a scarlet line across a dirty hand. Blood beads and spills. It’s not deep. Come on. Inside.

  In the kitchen, Nathan takes down the green plastic box and opens it. Ian is at the sink, holding his hand under the tap and he says you’d have thought I’d have learnt by now.

  Here. The younger brother tears the end of a paper pa
cket and takes out a damp cloth and begins to clean.

  Ian winces. Careful.

  Silence, for a time. Nathan dabs around the wound, takes a second cloth and does the same. It is like treating his own hand, he thinks – the same shape, the same lines on the palm, the blackened nails and calluses that are yellow-coloured and rough. How did Kitty stand it? Who’d choose to have such a hand move over her body, for doesn’t it catch or graze her? Nathan takes lint and cuts it. He places it on, finds transparent tape.

  You doing OK? Ian asks it.

  Miss her.

  I bet.

  Do you want a bandage on it?

  This’ll do. He turns his hand over, examining it.

  Ian?

  Hm?

  I’ve done something. Oh God, Ian – this thing I’ve done …

  There are stories to tell and there are stories not to tell, and Nathan does not know which this one is. He doesn’t know. All night, he has thought what do I do? This story is the worst kind; would telling it make it better in some way? And if so, who does he tell it to?

  There was no-one but Ian. Even if Tom had still been living, Nathan would only have thought of telling Ian and no other. He could not have coped with Tom’s face, when he heard – the shock and his failing to understand why, but the disappointment mainly. Oh, the disappointment. Hadn’t Nathan been the brother who he followed, copied, listened to? This is how the world is – bright, with decent people in it.

  It would always have been Ian. Ian, who has no such beliefs. A farmer cannot believe in happy endings when he may kill his own sheep in the concrete room at the back of this barn and pours buckets of disinfectant over the floor when it is over, washing the blood into the drain. Not when he thinks that a man with no memory must, instinctively, be a thief of some kind. No high hopes. Never were.

  They are still in the kitchen.

  I’ve been having an affair.

  Ian looks up from his injured hand. He stares. What?

  An affair. With Rona.

  Rona? Lovegrove? An affair?

  For nearly nine months.

  Ian can only stand. He blinks several times. He shakes his head and he forms shapes with his mouth as if to speak but he does not speak.