The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  She missed Parla too, in the end. She returned in her thirties – leather-skinned, and wiser – and as she stood on the deck of the Morning Star, Tabitha Bright decided this: that there are other loves. There are other fervent, warm, rewarding, long-lasting loves which change lives. It is not just romantic love that turns the world, and if she cannot change her heart, or who it will always truly belong to, she can at least choose to pour a different love into her island life. And she has. She has been an exemplary nurse. She has lifted slick, squawking babies into the salty air, and kissed the foreheads of the frail whilst whispering I’m here … She has developed the knack of injections so that the patient doesn’t notice it, and yes, Tabitha does all she can to be a deft, loving, compassionate nurse, as well as dependable aunt, sister and friend.

  She feels a thousand loves for other people. And she would not change them. They fill in the spaces, as the tide does.

  Forty years on – forty-seven, if she’s exact – and Tabitha can still see that mouthed, half-smiling I’m sorry and she wonders at this moment, as she’s often done, if perhaps it was predictive; perhaps those two, breathy words were not meant for the dozens of students or the lecturer, or the rainy afternoon, but for her. Just her.

  * * *

  No-one knows, of course. Or rather, no-one has told her they know. Perhaps it’s been suspected – and Emmeline has drifted near a version of the truth, over the years. Did you meet someone in Africa? And Tabitha had merely shrugged, blushed. Her broken heart is known of, but not how it broke, or by whom.

  Never married? That question, too, comes once in a while. And Tabitha does not lie. She merely sighs, smiles gently and says I guess I never found the right man. After all, it’s true – she did not. If there was such a thing as the right man, he’s never found her and she’s never found him.

  But that’s life, that’s how it goes. We can’t have everything – not always. And why should she, Tabitha, be subjected to different laws to the rest of the world, where crabs get picked up and cracked open by gulls? And those gulls get caught in twine? Some live, some don’t. Some love and some are loved in return and if she was never meant to love romantically, equally, then she can at least help the others who are meant to love that way. She can, at least, smooth out the pathway for them, turn a blind eye. Take candles to an old pig farm.

  She is not the bitter type, and never was.

  Worse things happen … Which is true.

  So when Tabitha had stood in the porch of Lowfield and seen Maggie Bundy fighting him, thumping the chest of this unknown man and, later, leaning against his chest, she’d known. Tabitha had stood with a tea-tray in her hand, and recognised it. Love. Its wave was wrapping round them, crashing like glass.

  Do not call the police. Let the man stay. For she wanted them to grasp this love. To grasp this love and not let go.

  Take hold of it. They did. And Tabitha is so glad – on behalf of all the others who were not quick or strong enough, or for whom love was destined to quietly slip by. Isn’t it the rarest thing? Never mind the whale migrations, or total eclipses of suns and moons: love that lasts, and is returned in equal measure, is the rarest thing she knows of. What can she say, except grasp it? Lift the line gradually. Claim that shining rope as yours, as it passes by.

  Seventeen

  The wind races, overnight. It loosens the leaves of the schoolyard’s tree; it parts the feathers of the kittiwakes which perch on the cliffs between the lighthouse and Sye – white, feathered circles, with a pinkish centre of skin.

  The air vent is tut-tut-tut-tut-tut.

  Pigeon turns on her mooring. She pulls, craving the sea.

  Rona is not inside. She does not sleep. She is cold – but she stands barefoot on the grass. The foghorn is beside her. They stand, the foghorn and her, and look out at the water.

  She wears her pyjamas. She embraces herself, her hands wrapped round each shoulder.

  Every twelve seconds there is a sweep of light.

  She asks herself what she loves about this man. She asks herself why it has been him, Nathan, whom she has wanted and hungered for, above all the other men. What had drawn her to him, in the beginning? His looks? His nature?

  What Rona remembers is how she saw her parents dancing in the kitchen, one Christmas Eve – no music, just her father’s tuneless, loving hum. And what she remembers, too, is the stories she heard when she was small – all the stories of love (always of love) that her mother would tell in the moments before bed, the myths and legends of Parla and elsewhere that involved yearning, and passion, and kind, handsome men who’d lay their cloaks over puddles for beautiful ladies or wait a hundred years for just one kiss. And this island is this island – so that when Rona reached her teens, and changed shape, and began to imagine tales of her own in which she, Rona, might be the lady herself, where could she go? On this trapped rock? Surrounded by lobsters, and sheep? And with no boys she liked, no pub, no club. No parties to go to.

  No parties at all – except once, there was one. One midsummer night, eight years ago. Rona had been seventeen – not a girl and not a woman, that strange age of both nothing and everything where you feel so alive, and yet are so unsure of how to explore or express this life, in any way. Seventeen. Naïve and yet wanting to learn. Wanting to be wanted, and to meet that handsome prince. Wanting to look like the woman who none of the islanders knew – curved, scented, hungry-eyed, in a red backless dress. She was casual, hypnotic; her eyes were lined in black. And she was dancing by the bonfire with Nathan Bundy watching her as if he’d been captured, astonished – under her spell.

  At that moment, Rona turned her gaze to him. She took her eyes away from the woman in red, and looked at him, instead – at his stare, his expression. How Nathan’s lips were parted. How he was not blinking. How he was illuminated by more than just the bonfire’s light.

  I wanted that. She says this, now. She’d wanted that look, from a man. And so all night, Rona watched them by that fire. She watched (biting her thumb, embarrassed, aware that she should not be watching) how they spoke to each other, how they drank from the same bottle of cider, how the woman danced with her slow-moving hips. Rona saw their first kiss, even – near Wind Rising’s barn, away from the fire and only half-lit. The smell of crushed grass; the cool feeling of that grass underfoot … Oh, she can remember it. And Rona remembers how she had wanted to be led into the barn by her hand as this red-dressed woman was being led, and she wanted to make a man look as Nathan had looked the next morning, and as Rona stands by the foghorn she sees that it all began from dreams, from childish longing. From stories that had been told.

  That night was better than anything that she’d read, or heard. Better, because it was true: there could, indeed, be meetings of chance which lead to love in a moment. There could be nights that change one’s life. She knew this because she saw it – with her own eyes, by a bonfire on the longest day of the year. And Rona still knew this when, a year later, she watched as Katherine Snow – bare-shouldered, white-laced, pink-lipped and sweet-smelling – walked up the aisle of Parla’s church with a bunch of daisies and gasps in her wake. Nathan had been breathless. He’d stood at the altar, clutched Tom’s arm and said look. Look … Not believing it.

  Since that midsummer’s night eight years ago, Rona has hungered. She has wanted the romance that changes everything – the love, the adoration that she had seen in Nathan’s eyes. And maybe, somehow, over the months and years that followed, when the only boy who cast a glance at her was Jonny Bundy who smoked too much weed and a tourist (clumsy, overweight, overbearing) with whom she had shared her first kiss, Rona had lost sight of the fact that a deep, fervent love might come, too, from other men – that millions of other men could look at a woman as Nathan had done; not just Nathan, alone. Maybe she’d dropped, without meaning to, the notion that what she wanted was his kind of love, so that it twisted itself like an unwell birth into simply his love or, even worse, him. Maybe, as she’d lain in her childhood bedroom
at the harbourmaster’s house and dreamt of an adult life with want in it, and infatuation, she brought to mind Nathan’s gaze because that was the only gaze she had known – the only clear, unequivocal, remarkable face of love that she had ever seen in her short life – and confused it. Nathan’s gaze became Nathan. The love he had for Kitty became, perhaps, the way he could also love me. Maybe all this time – in the most basic of ways – she has got this hugely, immeasurably wrong.

  Rona closes her eyes.

  All the things she went on to see Nathan do: the kiss he pressed into Kitty’s knuckles, the way he’d touch Kitty’s waist as she passed him by. How he’d stoop, pick a buttercup and tuck it into her waist-length hair. They were all things that Rona, too, wanted; she wanted a man to do those things to her. And because Nathan could do them, she started to want …

  I have been such a fool. Such a fool …

  But didn’t it grow worse? Because then Rona started trying. The mutation took place, so that Rona began to draw his name on the corners of books and onto her skin. And she started to look – believing that a wave from Nathan was more than a wave, and if he helped her over a stile she’d assess, fervently, the tightness with which he held her hand or the tone with which he said careful, now in case it had meaning to it. And Rona had scrutinised, also, the way Nathan and Kitty moved together, or spoke, or spoke about each other in the hope that there might, one day, be a widening between them, a fracture in the porcelain that seemed so extraordinary and lustrous and bright. For that would mean that he – this man who could love like no other man could – might not love Kitty as he used to. It might mean that he is ready to fall in love with me.

  Rona winces. Such a …

  And when did the cracks show? The silences between them, on the Morning Star? When did Kitty first start saying in the café Nathan seems so … distant … When did that begin?

  After Tom went overboard. That’s when.

  Oh … It is a sound of pain, regret, shame. It is the sound of a realisation which should have come sooner – if only it could have come sooner. If only she had had this airy, night-time clarity two years ago, or four, or six, and so much would not have been done: so much would not have been thought, or said. There would have been, at no point, the hard bite of guilt every time Kitty stepped into the café, shaking an umbrella or taking down her hood or laughing because the wind tried to take her, and always with a musical hello! There would have been no wild, desperate reading of messages, deciphering the codes that Rona felt sure were hidden there; there’d have been no small fortunes spent on underwear, online. No deceit, of such proportions. No self-deluded years. And so much less unhappiness – because how has this brought happiness? To anyone? Even when he was lying beside her, in her bed, Rona has never felt happy. His heart was never hers. His thoughts were always of Kitty, and home.

  He never loved me. Not once did Nathan look at Rona in the way he’d looked at a dancing, red-dressed woman at a party, eight years ago. Of course not. And that was all Rona had ever wanted. She had only ever yearned to be led by the hand, or to have a buttercup tucked behind her ear.

  In which case, maybe I have never loved Nathan either.

  And at that, Rona opens her eyes.

  There will be few stronger moments in Rona’s life than this. There will be very few that she will remember so clearly and with such feelings – awe, regret, relief. And it will be hard, she knows, for a long time to come. She may not have been in love – but fondness had not been absent, nor care. And she feels so very guilty, so foolish and unkind that she knows she does not like herself, and may not for some time. It will be so hard … How might she move on? How might she stop hurting? She does not know how to start.

  And I am so sorry – so sorry …

  Rona cries a little. But as she cries, she thinks she hears a voice – so that she turns, scans the fields and the night-time sea. The wind? The water? Her imagination? It will be alright. That’s what she hears, or thinks she does. Rona sniffs, half-smiles.

  She treads across the grass. Climbs back into her still-warm bed.

  Rona finds another hour of sleep. She lies on her front, showing the grassy soles of her feet.

  Nathan, too, is sleeping. A dream of a small bird tattoo.

  * * *

  Still early, but there is sunlight, now. At the harbourmaster’s house, the toast pops up.

  Ed butters it. He hollers up the stairs to his son, with his mouth full. Get up, Sam! The radio has no good news to say so he turns it off. He has heard it before. He’d heard, too, the shipping forecast which talks of the moon’s perigee, and the highest tide of all.

  Upstairs his wife is showering. He smells soap, lavender.

  Sam!

  The Morning Star sits, waiting. No black crate on the quayside; no lobsters from Maggie. But he did not expect them. When did she last bring lobsters down? She is busy doing other things these days.

  A wavering voice from the attic. Dad …

  He waits, calls again. Sam grasps the banister.

  Ed finds him, says son?

  Migraine.

  When did it start?

  An hour ago.

  Right. It’s OK. Back to bed.

  What about the ferry?

  We’ll manage with three.

  * * *

  The ferry leaves. It is a crew of three, not four – but sometimes it can happen that way. And the Fishman returns to me. He kisses my shoulder, holds me from behind.

  I say I’m nervous. This tide has taken lives before …

  He rocks me, as he holds me. The sea won’t hurt me. It’s had its chance already – hasn’t it?

  What else? This: in the house called Easterly, Nathan is sitting on a kitchen chair. He has a towel around his shoulders, and his mother is standing behind him with the dressmaking scissors. A trim, he repeats. Don’t hack off bits …

  Tabitha is also there. She is sitting on the work surface as a teenager would. She cradles a mug of tea and swings her legs and she is so full of love as she watches them – her sister frowning through her reading glasses, snipping at the hair of her second-youngest son. Yes, she is so very full of love. Why did it take so long? To say sorry to Emmeline, to speak the truth? Why was she so proud, so despondent, so afraid of the talk that took, in the end, half an hour to have? But now we are here. Emmeline snips. Nathan looks at his aunt with an expression that makes her smile: trepidation, resignation, boredom, relief, a little bit of humour, and maybe, for the first time in a long while, she sees in him the smallest look of hope.

  In the evening, Ian finds his wife. He has his hands behind his back so that she eyes him, bemused. What have you got …?

  He has flowers. They are sitting in a jam-jar – daisies, grasses, thistle heads.

  Constance takes them from him. She is amazed. Come here …

  Dee tucks a chattering Nan into bed. Can we go beachcombing? In the morning? There might be another Fishman washed ashore, or a treasure chest with pearls in, and gold …

  The Coyles climb into bed – the springs creak.

  Lorcan plays his nocturne, and he plays it perfectly.

  The highest tide comes in. It moves onto the cove at Sye. The pale eye of a dry stone grows smaller and smaller. The water fills the space between each stone so that they shift, rub against themselves. And the water keeps coming – it passes onto stones that have not been touched by the sea for a long time.

  Sye grows smaller; then Sye is gone.

  And now the parched weed at the highest part of Lock-and-Key feels the sea upon it; it fattens, lifts up from the sand as if saying at last … And the waves creep onto the thin grass, under the fence, under the line of lonely rubber boots. Perhaps the boots look down at the water; perhaps they are searching for their lost friends. Lock-and-Key, also, is submerged by this tide.

  At Store Bay, the dunes where the giant lived are striped with sea. It snakes down between the dune grass. A mouse and a spider make for higher ground. Sheep bleat, push up
from their resting place.

  Mussels vanish; the harbour wall grows smaller. The sea stacks look like half their height.

  Sea Fairy creaks on her moorings.

  Tap Hole fills itself to the brim.

  The man from Sye stands above the beach where he came ashore. He is barefoot. He undoes a shirt button, then a second button.

  The Lovegrove boy – who has no migraine, who lied about that – lights a cigarette, exhales above his head. The wind carries the smoke to the south. Sam is wearing his oilskins. By his feet, he has a bag.

  And me? What of me? What am I doing, at this moment?

  I sit in Crest’s garden. I am wrapped in a blanket, looking at the water. A silver-black sea and a silver moon.

  All night I sit there. I whisper let this work – to the sky, the sheep, the northerly wind, to the voles that quiver in their nettle bed, to the ghost of Tom or the sea itself or to something greater than all of these things.

  And later, too, I said thank you. It had been a month of such strangeness and such beauty. So many changes to that small island and to those small lives that spend their days on it; somehow, our lives seemed larger, now.

  A month of stories, new and old.