The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  It’s over now. I’ve finished it.

  Kitty knew? Is that why she went?

  Kitty doesn’t know. She knows I’m distant and half-drunk and we never –

  Jesus, Nathe! Are you mad? An affair? And with Rona bloody Lovegrove? She’s twenty-four!

  Twenty-five.

  The elder man waves his hand, dismissing it. OK, whatever – it doesn’t matter how old she is. Kitty … For God’s sake. What were you thinking? And how can you think no-one would know?

  No-one does know.

  Are you sure about that? Has she told anyone?

  No.

  Has anyone seen? Worked it out? They will have done. This island …

  No-one knows. And I don’t think she’ll tell. She’s angry, but …

  The kitchen shifts, listening. The boiler ticks.

  It is over, Ian.

  Ian shakes his head. He does not understand, and Nathan knew he wouldn’t fully. But there is, too, a heaviness to him – how he sighs, looks away – as if unsurprised somehow. As if he expects the world to be this way.

  I needed to tell someone. I don’t know what to do.

  Bit late for advice, Nathe.

  Kitty. Do I tell Kitty? I want her back, and –

  You think telling her will bring her back? Ian almost laughs.

  He thinks that if he tells her she will, most likely, never return. She is Kitty – fiery, artistic, who likes to paint a glittery deep-green on her eyelids and who claims that she has travelling blood. She’d hear the truth and hang up. Or slap him – quick, across the cheekbone. No, if he told her he would lose her but at least she would know. At least she would have been handed the truth – however gnarled and corruptive it might be; at least she could make what could be called an informed choice and there would be no lies any more. The truth – like a floor swept clean or the air after a summer storm. There could be new starts; how can there be a new start if there is a lie, or a truth kept from her? Doesn’t she deserve to know what happened. What took place?

  It would destroy her, Ian says.

  But haven’t I lied enough to her? Nathan rubs his eyes.

  Yeah, you’ve probably lied enough for the whole island, frankly. But you’ve got to ask yourself something: who would be helped, now? By telling the truth?

  Kitty?

  Really? I don’t think so. I think she’ll hear her husband has been shagging a girl twenty years her junior – a girl who she sees three, four, five times a week, a girl who sells Kitty’s own paintings – and not, actually, be helped at all. How could that help her? Nathan, you …

  She’d know the truth, though. She could –

  Leave you? She’s already left you.

  I love her.

  Then don’t hurt her. For Christ’s sake, man. Haven’t you hurt her enough?

  Nathan nods. But he also knows that if she chooses to return, and if he chooses never to speak of the affair, it will mean a lifetime of that one lie: he will never lose it. He will have to feel the guilt inside him, knowing that she does not know. As Kitty rinses her paintbrushes or fastens a bracelet or scoops up the cat and talks to her, or as she pads through the garden barefoot as she likes to, or as she moves her body over his in a half-lit room and bends down to kiss him he will see the lie, feel the lie inside him. A lie like a death. The weight of it.

  But perhaps that’s the price. Perhaps that is the cost of it – that he will have to drag this guilt and knowledge through life as he has seen a ewe drag a bramble or a gull fly with twine around his leg; he must feel guilt and endure it for that is better, far better, than Kitty’s heart hearing the truth, and breaking apart. It is far better than her ever feeling sad, or less than loved again.

  Ian makes tea. He pours the water in each mug, sets the kettle down.

  Tell me it is over. Promise me.

  It is. I promise.

  If she comes back to you, treasure her.

  If she comes back to me, I will treasure her. For always.

  Later, they both stand in the same way – leaning against the kitchen worktops, one hand in a pocket and with their legs crossed at the ankles. There is no Bundy curse. You know that.

  You sure?

  You aren’t like Dad. None of us are like him.

  The drink’s in me, Nathan says.

  Ah – he shrugs. The drink’s in everyone. But it’s how we manage it. We break the cycle, Nathan – that’s what we do.

  Ian sips; the bathroom air vent rattles. How would it be, if Tom was with them at this moment? He drank tea all the time. He only took a drop of milk and he’d fit whole biscuits into his mouth, and all you can do is manage the absence and how it feels, and try to find good from it. No regret, and no affairs. Mind you, you’ll get the Bundy baldness.

  Nathan smiles over his mug. No chance.

  * * *

  I know the island is waiting. We all are. We are counting the days we have left until the sly tide comes.

  I know this, and I touch my Fishman. My Fishman, whose true name I know.

  And if anyone else knows of waiting, it is Sam – who waits, and waits.

  It is all that Sam has ever done – for the past four years, or nearly. For nearly four years he has slept poorly; he has sat by Crest in the darkness and waited in case I might ask, at last, for his help. He has waited so long for an act in which he can make amends, or try to. For sorry, to Sam, is not enough. He has tried to say sorry – but it felt like air. It felt like nothing, like a faint approximation of what was inside him; as a single chest feather approximates a bird in flight or as a single tap of rain against the glass represents a storm, or as saltwater in cupped hands – mirrored, protected – tries but fails entirely to be an image of the sea.

  I will do anything to make this better for you. Anything. Sam wrote this, pushed it under my porch door not long after Tom died. I found it, and read it amongst my tomato plants. And ever since, I know that Sam Lovegrove has been waiting, holding his breath. He’s been filling my fuel containers, cutting my hedge, tucking more logs beneath my green tarpaulin without my asking for it. And all this while he has been waiting for the day when I might come to him – serious, gentle – and say I have something to ask of you.

  I will do anything.

  I know he waits. We all do – but Sam waits most of all.

  The moon shines through his curtains so that he can see his whitened room. His weights sit, discarded. The powdery baleen of a pilot whale that he found, as a boy, is ghostly at this moment. It looks magical, with purpose. Sam holds his breath.

  A blue light. His phone.

  It is this, from Leah: X. Healthy and vital.

  He sends this back: Xxx.

  * * *

  There is a candle between us, the Fishman and I.

  We sit at the table at the old pig farm. We look at the candle – how it spills its wax, how its flame feels our breath.

  For we talk. We plan.

  He must leave in two nights’ time and we must work out how.

  The Fishman asks me this: what makes a good story? You know your stories.

  I consider this. And I say it must have happiness in it – people finding it. It must have a landscape that fills the mind, and can be seen so clearly you feel you could be walking there. It must have love. Perhaps a little sadness. And it must have a journey, of some kind.

  The Claw and the Prediction

  Once and once only did we walk on Sye.

  It was not where we tended to go. If we walked, we went west – over the fields and ducking through the wire fences until we came to the coastal path. In wild weather we’d stand on the headland; at low tide we’d make our way down the wooden stairs to Lock-and-Key where the rubber boots were. You and those boots … I’d pick through the driftwood and Tom would tell me the stories he hadn’t yet told, or ones that I knew but had asked for again. We wrote our names in the sand, as children do.

  T LOVES M.

  Does he, now?

  He does. Can’t help h
imself, I’m afraid … And we’d walk hand in hand.

  But one day we were on Sye. And as we trod over its stones, I saw something. I bent down, picked it up. Look …

  A claw like no other claw – huge, a polished chestnut-brown with blackened tips and a grooved, serrated edge. Tom?

  That’s a big one … He turned it over, returned it back to me. And he kissed my forehead as I mourned the rest of this crab that had died – picked at by gulls or crushed against rocks. This is all that is left of its little crab life …

  It was then that Tom told me about the crab that can lose its claw and survive it. We were making our way back along the stones. We were not holding hands now but we were close enough to, and he said here’s a little tale for you … He described the life of the stone-crab – how fishermen would catch it and pluck off its largest claw before dropping it back onto the sea floor. And, in time, it grew a new claw. It made a replacement for that missing one. Then it’s caught again, and its larger claw is torn off a second time, and it’s thrown back where it grows a third … I stopped walking, confused. For how did it live? How did it eat? Defend itself? How did it do anything, for surely its largest claw is what defines the crab and ensures its existence? Without it, does it not risk a short and unfair life?

  It manages, he said.

  But life is better with two claws, I bet …

  Maggie.

  He turned. The light was strange, pinkish. He put one hand on my waist and the other hand moved through my hair twice, three times before it stilled.

  I want you to be like that. If the worst happens.

  I listened to my husband and I hated what he said. I hated it for it conjured up a world in which he did not live, a world he was no part of and where he could not be found. I had married him because I wanted to be with him every day; I wanted to die before he died so that I would never be without him, and I hated the words he was saying – the phrases that started with Mags, if I die … I protested by trying to break free of him, but he only took a better hold and said but look what I do! For a living! He sailed most days. He went out in all weather and he might not go far – he might stay near the shore – but when did that mean true safety? He promised he’d always be careful. He promised he’d never take risks in his boat. Nothing will happen to me, he smiled – but isn’t it right that we talk …?

  He wanted me to be like the stone-crab. He wanted, he said, for me to rest as they do, to mend in my own time. Be sad, but not forever. Grow your claw again … And I shook my head. I muttered that if he died I would never grow a new claw, that I’d never want another claw in all my life. I only wanted the one I had now, the love I had in Tom Bundy. I wanted this hand with this wedding ring. I won’t grow a claw …

  Well, I’d want you to grow one. Just know that – OK? I’d want you to find someone else.

  We never spoke of it again. I did not like it – the thought of him gone – and it felt like a new reason to keep away from Sye. I chose to forget it because it did not matter; my husband would never die and I myself would never be plucked, torn, disarmed and cracked open by the impossible news of his death. Like all of us I thought it won’t happen to him. But such things happen to someone, and sometimes that someone is him, or it’s you.

  Boats can rock and men can grow tired.

  I have learnt that nothing stays the same. Today might seem the same as yesterday but no day ever is; we may want no changes to ever come, but changes do, in time. They cannot be helped; it is how the world turns. And so I may never have asked for love, or wished to grow a second claw, but these things happened all the same.

  It grew outside Lowfield, as I hissed take it off … Not as large as the first claw in many ways – but no less purposeful or real or strong. When I opened my arms and held the Fishman it only felt half-known. It took a long time to remember how certain parts worked, or how to behave with your heart and someone else’s heart, and nothing is ever easy. I can’t think of anything that has been easy, and a crab, if it could speak, would say the same. But I found love when I thought that it was gone for me. It is beyond my understanding, as so much is. It is stranger than any book could be.

  I’d want you to find someone else. Holding my waist on Sye. The whorl in his beard, the life in his eyes.

  I wear my wedding ring around my neck these days. And sometimes, when I feel it, I tell Tom I did – yes. For a while, I did.

  Sixteen

  So. All stories have to end. Giants must be turned into stones, Parlan imps must hide by dawn, and notes in bottles have to be read. The lighthouse has to close its eye. And a Fishman must walk back into the sea.

  * * *

  Sam rolls his cigarette on his knee. He pats the tobacco into a line, lays a white filter tip at one end. He begins to roll it, back and forth. Two licks, along the waxed edge of paper – one to the left, one to the right.

  He seals the cigarette, lights up.

  His phone shudders in his back pocket, makes a sound like a magic trick. Leah, surely.

  But it is not Leah. It is from Maggie.

  It says you said you would do anything. Did you mean it?

  He sends back immediately. Yes.

  Across the island, to the far south where the land is flat and fenceless, the Fishman can hear footsteps. He turns at the sound.

  They are Tabitha’s, and she comes with her hands behind her back so that she walks with a slight roll of the hips and gentle sway. It is how people walk when they have something to say; he knows her mind is elsewhere.

  Tabitha wrinkles her nose when she smiles. Almost done here, by the looks of it.

  Yes. Pretty much.

  He puts the paintbrush down. Together they walk through Tavey. He lets her pass through doorways first, his hand near the small of her back but not on it, and in each room the nurse tilts her head back. Oh, look … He watches her as she runs her finger along shelves, feels the sanded, painted doors, and he wonders if he loves her – this plump-bodied, plump-hearted woman who likes her pink wine, and has as many secrets inside her as he does. Story after story. Sadness, tucked away.

  Yes, he decides. He loves her. Astute, jovial, a little lonely, wise. He ducked into Lowfield one afternoon to find her dancing to the radio, moving round the kitchen with a loaf of freshly baked bread in her arms as if it were her lover, and it made her look like a young girl with her whole life ahead of her. He’d felt tender, as he’d watched – as if he was the older one. For a moment, he’d watched her dance and sing. And then he’d felt embarrassed for he was watching such privacy, a moment that was meant for no eyes but her own. He’d stepped away. He’d gone back into the garden. He’d waited for a moment before returning to the kitchen – calling hello? as he went. Giving her warning. She’d been cutting the bread, when he entered the room.

  I think … She shakes her head. Then, decisively, she says well, I have an urge to thank you.

  Thank me?

  A long sigh. Tabitha smiles. You don’t realise what you’ve done here.

  He does not understand her.

  Surely you’ve seen the difference. Think of Leah. She would barely leave the house. She would barely leave her bedroom, and now look at her …

  I didn’t do that.

  Don’t be too sure. There have been a hundred changes since you came here, and perhaps they aren’t your doing, but they’ve happened since you came. She shrugs. I want you to know I’ve loved having you here.

  He stands, then. He pushes himself away from the dresser and makes his way into the middle of the room. Tabitha frowns, half-expectant. And the man from Sye lifts his arms and he fits himself around her. He embraces her, and she is so small that he has to bend his knees, and he hears her make a sound.

  It is a mouse-like sound. A sigh, perhaps. Oh!

  Perhaps she has not been held for a while. Perhaps she has not been held so unexpectedly, so strongly, and not by a man who is so tall and broad. When their arms soften and they peel back from one another he sees her eyes are s
hining.

  I owe you so much, Tabitha.

  No …! Laughing.

  I do. You have been so kind to me.

  A breeze comes through the doorway, and there is the sound of a book’s pages turning themselves, one by one. Where had he been a month ago? Two months ago?

  Tabitha Bright. Well-named, she once told him.

  She pats his arm and whispers, it’s just what nurses do.

  * * *

  Sam makes his way up the lane, takes a path that leads past the airstrip and towards The Stash. He sees Maggie, as he approaches.

  Thank you. For meeting me.

  Sam knows this is what he’s been waiting for.

  * * *

  From Easterly, there is a view of The Stash. If Emmeline was standing in her garden at this moment, if she was straightening up from her flowerbed or her small vegetable patch and looked south and east, she would see two figures, talking. A blonde woman and a reddish-blond man. They lean on the fence above The Stash, look down.

  But Emmeline is not in her garden.

  She has not slept well. She spent the night awake – making tea, carrying that tea back to bed with a crossword or a romance novel, and turning out the light twenty minutes later only to find herself staring at the ceiling again. Counting the seconds between each passing beam of light. And so today she is leaden. She sits at her kitchen table, with her palms laid down.

  I have been unkind.

  She knows that for the past month she has avoided Tavey. She has puckered her mouth at the mention of the Fishman or that man from Sye so that others knew how she felt and might change the conversation to the weather, or the sheep. When she has spied him – black eyes, bright smile – she has felt a weight inside her, a fluttered movement as if she was carrying a child again. Deep down.

  She knows her suspicion is unfair. She knows, now (but she probably always knew) that this stranger has not come for trouble or to hurt them all. He has sanded wood, painted it. Emmeline’s granddaughter has become the happier, strong-bodied creature that she used to be, and her own three children have seemed closer to each other whilst he’s been here – and she doesn’t know why, or how. But I should have said more to him. Over the weeks.