The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  Yes, clothes. They are neatly folded. There are jeans with a hole in the left knee, a red and black shirt with a torn collar, a pair of blue socks. Sturdy boots with paint on the toe.

  Someone must be swimming, Rona says.

  Swimming? With no clothes on?

  Some people do.

  No, they don’t! Incredulous. Don’t be so silly …

  What else could it be?

  The younger girl is firm. They are the Fishman’s clothes. He’s become a fish again.

  Nan –

  She stamps her foot. It’s true! Look at the clothes! And it was a full moon last night!

  They stand there for a while, on Sye. The breeze moves their hair; the waves are white-tipped. And Rona knows that yes, they are the stranger’s clothes. He has worn this shirt; she has seen him in these boots. But why are they here? Folded on Sye? She can see no swimmer. She can see no reason for him to set out into the sea, fully naked and whilst the island is still sleeping unless … Suicide. A word like a shock. It makes Rona close her eyes, momentarily. Oh God. Surely not that? Surely? And yet she can think of no other answer; it is all she has to give.

  He’s grown his tail? Hasn’t he? Half-sung.

  Rona makes a choice, at that moment. And she chooses to lie. She looks down at her sister and says yes – yes, he has. For Nancy is six and three-quarters. Nancy is chirping, hopping from foot to foot and she believes that the world is a safe, amazing, happy place – and how could Rona change that? With the truth? Rona thinks let her stay as she is.

  She puts her hand on her little sister’s head. She feels the curly hair, the plastic clip with a ladybird on it but Nan is absorbed with a shell that she has found, by the clothes. She holds it to her ear. She peers inside it, as if the Fishman left a clue for her.

  I love you, Button.

  Don’t call me that …

  Come on. Let’s take you home.

  Rona carries the clothes back to the lighthouse. They climb into the car, drive to Crest and Rona tells her sister wait here. I won’t be long. Then she makes her way up the drive. She thinks, my God. What do I say? How do I tell her?

  The yellow door opens as Rona comes to it. Maggie says come in, and steps back to let her pass into a neat, clean kitchen with the kettle whistling and two coffee cups on the worktop – as if Maggie has been watching her driveway, waiting for a car. As if she has been expecting this, all along.

  Gone. Gone in the way he came – in a way with no understanding, no reason. Gone, so that it was hard to believe that he had been there at all. And maybe he never was … Maybe we had imagined him entirely. Until we saw Tavey with its freshly painted guttering and its mown lawn, the bare earth where the pig shelters had been.

  Nathan and Kitty are the last to know. They have turned their phones off. They have drawn their curtains, closed the bedroom door.

  They are fully clothed. She sits on the edge of the bed and her husband kneels in front of her. She is stroking his hair as he tells her, slowly, about all of it – the night-time sounds, the Parlan imps, the snuffled sound of Tom as he slept beside him and how the scar by his own eye was not from a cricket ball. And he talks of the love, the guilt. The fear and the love and the guilt.

  Why did you never tell me?

  He doesn’t know. He does not have any answers to give – only a wish to climb into the bed with her and lie beside her. That and only that. And Kitty leans down, kisses his face.

  You should have told me. I’m your wife, Nathe …

  I’ve got so much wrong.

  We all get things wrong.

  I’m so sorry …

  Do you love me?

  He shakes his head in disbelief. Like nothing else. Like nothing else.

  They undress. And as he rolls over her, he knows what he feels – what he has, what he wants and has always wanted. It is released, in that bed. I am grateful. He is grateful that she is here; grateful that he did not lose her when he deserved to, absolutely. He is grateful that despite what he has known, there remains goodness; despite the loss and the lies and the unfairness, there is Kitty and her warm skin. She is here. She is above him. She is a bird tattoo and Miss Dior and a hay barn and a starry night sky and she is the word wife, and he is humbled by her in a way that he has never allowed himself to be, until now. How did he ever win her? How did he ever earn her, once? Or deserve this second chance? He will live his life astonished by this.

  Gratitude. He can see its letters on the pillow, on the ceiling. He sees forgiveness. He sees luck, also – all kinds of it – and as Kitty holds him he sees how he tried his best, his very best. What more could he do? He could not have loved more. He knows he could not have saved Tom.

  I could not have saved him. The knowledge of it all rushes in like water – clean, cool. It washes everything.

  * * *

  It is a strange night. Some half-sleep; some sit, and think of his face. Others walk outside with a drink in their hand and look up at the moon, the distant lights of boats.

  In High Haven, they lie like spoons. Nathan’s hand clasps her hand – the back of her left hand fits the palm of his, so that their wedding rings find each other with a single tack. Kitty bites her lower lip, smiles.

  And someone else is smiling, or is about to smile.

  Sam wakes. The room is darker – darker than drawn curtains alone. He waits, and waits, and there is a half-second flash. Nancy sleeps beside him. She has climbed into his bed whilst he’s been sleeping and she has wedged herself, comma-like, between the wall and his chest. She snores. He thinks little Nan … Who no-one expected to come.

  When he was her age, he believed in magic. He believed in the Fishman – for a while, at least. And then Sam grew. He became an adult, and discovered adult life. It takes so little, he thinks, to lose it; grief and disappointment can take one’s faith away so easily that you might wake one morning and have none left. He woke, one day, with nothing. No hope, or self-worth. And now?

  He knows this much: that Nan does not know love, not yet. She does not know the strength of it, what it can make a person do for another person’s sake. We will risk it all – for love. And one day she will know this, which is the greatest tale of all.

  Sam fits himself against her.

  And then Sam smiles. He smiles and smiles at what he has done, into her salt-smelling hair.

  The Widow and the Man from Sye

  Once there was a woman – blonde-haired, blue-eyed. She wandered. She drifted from town to town, from job to job, for she had no true sense of home except for what she carried and what she loved – which was skies, books, trees in wind, water, geese flying south.

  She had not asked for love, but then she met a man.

  She loved how he kissed, and the stories he had; how he called her Maggie-May. They married on Parla, and when he held her at the altar Tom whispered I will love you all my life.

  Nineteen months later, he died. He tried to save a drowning boy, and did – but drowned himself in doing so. Maggie waded out, waist-deep. She ached for him to come back to her, for him to return, pink-cheeked and half-laughing, saying well, that was an adventure … later, she ached for his body to be found. She spent hours in church. She lit a single white candle and set it in the porch at Crest as if to guide his boat in. She trawled the coastal paths by day and took to wearing Tom’s clothes at night, pressing the sleeves to her nose, trying to find the last, warm, precious, fading smell of him.

  * * *

  Nearly four years later, a man was washed ashore. On a stony northern beach, a half-naked man was left there by the tide. Briefly, they thought Tom? For a moment, each person on that island held their breath and thought, is it him? But no. It was not Tom. Of course not; it couldn’t be. This man was taller, broader; his eyes were so black that his pupils were lost. Lashes like miniature fans.

  So who might he be? This man with no name? For he had no memory of his life before Parla, before the moment he was found.

  Old stories shook off
their dust. Half-lost, superstitious talk rose out of the dark – sea songs and folklore, bedtime tales. He is the Fishman, Abigail said. And whilst most of them looked for better answers, there were no better ones to have. It was all they could find – and all they wanted. A man with a rainbow tail.

  Maggie saw the stranger on a Saturday afternoon. She walked into the garden at Lowfield and lost her breath. And in the days that followed, flowers opened. Seals basked on rocks. The old pig farm was mended and secrets were hauled into the light, and the minister could finally play a nocturne perfectly – no wrong notes. Maggie wanted this man to hold her, to fill all her empty spaces. And, very gently, he did.

  Hope and wonder, Abigail said. It’s what it says here, in my book.

  Her book also said he will stay for one moon’s turn …

  For the Fishman was meant for the sea. He could not stay forever; he could not stay without end, and so when the tide was at its highest and the moon was full, he went down to Sye. He found his tail where he had left it, shook the tail out. It flashed like foil. It flashed so brightly that it woke the widow who stretched, turned to find him gone.

  All day she could not find him. The islanders looked in chicken sheds, and barns. They ran torches into each cave. They looked under every tarpaulin, in Wind Rising’s kennel, along and under each pew in the church. And it was only as the day grew old that his clothes were found – stacked in order of thickness so that his socks were on top, side by side.

  The news was passed on. They turned off their torches.

  In the half-dark they trudged back to their homes.

  Suicide? Some said so. They could find no other explanation and so they shook their heads and said to each other it’s tragic. He seemed a good man …

  Or it was an accident, perhaps. For who would fold their clothes so neatly, as their final act? And aren’t the currents strong, or quite strong, off Sye? And hadn’t it been the spring perigean tide last night which is also called the sly tide so that it would have been so easy – so easy – to have been caught out by the water? That must be what happened … After all, he’d not been Parlan: how might he have known?

  Or it was the Fishman. Some of the islanders said this, of course. And it could not be denied that his departure was in keeping with the Fishman’s story – secretly, on a full moon, having changed the ones he’d met and leaving there is hope on the grass, amongst his folded clothes.

  * * *

  Strange, what the heart can bear. It can carry grief beyond measure. It can bear a weight that is too great to speak of.

  But a heart can’t bear the world. It has its limits – even a heart like Maggie’s which had thickened with scarring over the years. The Fishman went and autumn came. She trod the coastal paths. She touched the line of rubber boots. She stood on Bundy Head in her anorak and looked at the water – dark-grey and dimpled with rain.

  In the prayer book, they found her handwriting; in Crest, they found her packing things.

  Sam Lovegrove knew. He was the first to know it, and said when are you going? Soon?

  She left in early December. She stood at the back of the Morning Star in a hard, sideways sleet and she watched Parla grow smaller. Its lighthouse started turning as she moved away from it.

  Apparently Maggie lives on the mainland, now. Is she happy? They hope so. They still hear from her – a letter, or text message. She calls Emmeline, sometimes. And they imagine that she lives a quiet, inland life with fruit trees in the garden and the neat, brisk trot of foxes in the lane, at dusk. Perhaps she has new friends. Perhaps she misses the sea but also, perhaps, she does not.

  And him? What is the story of him? The Fishman with his breadth and height?

  The story, I hear, is this now: that the Fishman thinks of her daily. He cannot reach Maggie in her new inland home and so he stays near Parla, in case she may return. He passes the beaches she has walked on; he rises from the water, watches the people she loves. And some of the islanders think they have felt him passing, on occasion – Leah, Rona, Abigail. Even Nathan, once, as he made his way home, climbed over a stile.

  All will be well … Or I am with you.

  They pause, hear it. Smile to themselves.

  That is the story they know. They know it because we chose to tell it; we gave it to them like the shells that they have always been hoping to find on the beach. All of us go down to low-tide shorelines to look for the finest treasure of all – curious, coloured, unbroken things; sculptured wood or sea glass or a stone so round, so perfectly round that you suppose it’s been rolled by the tides for more than your lifetime. Centuries, even – if this stone could talk … Or we hope that we might find a wellington boot that matches, exactly, another salty boot. I always hoped for that. I’d gather my feathers and my well-travelled shells, but it was boots I longed for. I wanted to find the other half of a matching pair, and hang it on the fence-post by its grateful friend. I wanted to end another’s waiting – for I felt I could never end my own. An odd thing to hope for? A boot? It is, absolutely. I have never told anyone of it. Boots don’t have feelings, I know that, and nor do the lesser treasures that I left behind. But we all have our comforts. Does it matter if they are childish, or strange? If they are stories or shanties, or our tiny superstitions? Not to me. I think there’s beauty in them. I think they are us – unique and very precious. They are what help us through the lonely nights and days.

  Nineteen

  He was nowhere to be found. The days fanned out, and he did not come back. The autumn changed the sky and the leaves and I did not see him walking in the lane again.

  I missed him so much that it hurt. I cried, and had no wish to eat. But also, I had known a deeper sort of pain. I have known far, far worse – and so I dressed every morning, brushed my teeth, tore two rectangular tea bags apart without finding meaning in it. I took to the old routines: lifting up the lobster pots, treading on a spade to push it down, into the soil. Sometimes I would sit on the doorstep at Tavey and touch the place where he had sat, as if it may still hold his warmth. Once, I talked of unfairness. But I also knew, and told myself, that this is how it must be.

  At night, I would step out of my clothes and look at myself. I’d stand before the mirror and see what he had seen – my body’s flaws, its signs of age. Puckered skin, and softened parts. I looked, perhaps, for fingerprints but there were none to see.

  They were all kind to me. One by one, they came – Dee, with a homemade pie; Nathan, with his hugs in which we’d rock, from side to side. Abigail rang: I’m only ringing to tell you that he isn’t dead. You understand me? And I knew that she believed, absolutely, that he twisted through shoals and skimmed the sea floor. Crested, with the blowing whales. Thank you, I told her – loving her. Yes, yes I know.

  Lorcan came, also. He came with his cool pianist’s hands which took my own hands and held them, and I wondered if he could feel the truth through his fingertips – my strange notes, my secret chords. If he did, he did not mind them. There aren’t always answers, Maggie. It was all he could say and it was enough.

  There were times when I nearly told the truth. Nathan came to see me more and more. We’d walk on the coastal path, arm in arm, and he spoke of Tom – stories I’d not heard before. Oh, he loved you, Maggie … And at that moment, I nearly told Nathan all that I knew about the Fishman – his life, his non-death, his real name. But the moment passed. I closed my mouth. It was not a story to tell.

  How is Kitty?

  She’s well. We both are … I knew that this was true. I had seen them running through the rain not long before with one anorak between them, held above their heads – and I recognised what I saw between them as they ran. And I was so glad for him.

  I knew they slept like speech marks and I knew that they slept well.

  I shared pots of tea at Wind Rising. Constance poured, talked about the small things that make up a life – the price of fleece, the winter ahead, how the dog was growing old. She made lemon cakes that tasted like sunshi
ne.

  You are coping so well, she said, leaning forwards. Two losses. Maggie …

  One. I held my finger up. Just the one. He was the Fishman, wasn’t he?

  She’d laughed. Yes, of course.

  Not gone.

  And if I ever doubted what we’d done, he and I, it faded at that exact moment. I will never forget it – how Leah descended the staircase, moved through the kitchen with hello, Auntie Mags, how she touched my arm as she walked behind me as if trying to pass a little comfort on. Leah Bundy, in a white angora jumper. Leah, as a woman – beautiful, curved, bright-eyed, adventurous, healthy, hopeful, strong.

  Hester would deliver my mail last of all so that she might stay with me a while. Milton would pop an extra something – a packet of peppermints, a magazine, a bar of soap, a miniature bottle of single malt whisky – into my shopping bag, as I stood at the till. Rona knocked on my door one afternoon with a slice of cake – it’s a new recipe. Pear and white chocolate. Would you try it? And she kept coming to me. She stopped bringing cakes, after a while, so that I wondered what Rona sought or was needing. Sometimes I felt she had questions to ask; she’d linger in doorways, or pinch her lips together with her fingers as if frightened of her words. Rona? What is it?

  The tears had come. How did you learn to let go? Move on?

  I never told her that I had seen her, treading round High Haven in the dark. I only passed her a tissue, put my hand on her forearm as she cried and I told her that letting go is not a choice, in many ways. You try to move on, perhaps. But it comes of its own accord, in the end; it happens when it is ready to, and it mostly comes by without announcement or being noticed at all. I’ll always miss my husband. I won’t ever be the person I was before. But one day, you find that a tune on the radio no longer makes you buckle, or lunge to change the frequency; one day a lightbulb dies, and as you climb the step-ladder to change it you think it’s just one of those things, rather than feel it is symbolic and unbearable, and you do not cry to hear the tiny broken filament when you shake the bulb by your ear. You don’t mend fully, I tell her. But you mend enough, in time.