The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  An ending comes when the thing that has been waited for surfaces, at last, or steps down off a bus. An ending comes when a person walks into a crowded room – just one more face amongst hundreds, but she spots him as soon as he enters. She knows the shape of his wrist, his laugh. He knows, too, how she moves.

  He says, remember me? Perhaps.

  An ending like that. Something like that is best.

  I am walking down the lane when this ending comes.

  It is snowing. It is light, wet snow which settles very thinly on the tops of gateposts and my woollen hat. I carry a cardboard box in my arms. It is late afternoon; the bluishness of winter dusk is not far away, and the cows look darker for it. They watch me as I pass. I can smell the coldness, the wood-smoke. Their sweet hay-breath.

  I push the gate with my hip, close it with my foot.

  I fumble in my pocket for my key.

  There are stories of people who know when change is coming, of an instinct which unfurls in the moments before such moments and perhaps those tales are true. After all, we are creatures; the gulls all came ashore in the hours before storms; the sheep seemed to know when the north wind was due. When Kitty stepped into a flame-red dress a decade ago, she’d had a strange feeling inside her – as if this dress would matter, somehow. I felt so awake, Maggie! As if … But me? Not me. All my life’s great moments have happened without foreshadowing. I sensed nothing at all before I met Tom Bundy and nothing before losing him; I had no idea when a man was washed ashore. I was stacking pint glasses or pulling on a pair of socks. Or I was making a mug of camomile tea.

  And so I am pressing the cardboard box against the wall to keep it there and I’m trying to find my keys in my pocket with my gloved hand but it is hard, in these gloves, so I pull off that glove with my teeth and try again. My nose is cold; I want to put the kettle on.

  There was never a less likely moment. He says my name.

  I drop the keys. The word stops me entirely. I stay as I am – my glove in my mouth, my eyes on the keys that have fallen. The keys are gold on white snow. I do not turn around.

  He says it again. Maggie …

  Two years, three months and two days since we said goodbye to each other in a high-walled harbour; one hundred and sixteen weeks since I stood on that slab of stone and watched Pigeon grow smaller, thinking please keep him safe … Eight hundred and fourteen days since I last heard his voice, and yet this is his voice. I am hearing it now.

  He walks round to face me so that I see his boots, his trouser hems. Slowly, I look up.

  His beard is gone. In its place, there is pale, smooth skin and briefly I think it is not him at all – but it is. It is him. His eyes are still his eyes; he has the same height, the same warm breadth. He tilts his head and gives a small smile, and that is his smile.

  He takes the glove from my mouth, very gently.

  Dreams cannot match the good waking moments. The right waking moments are better, by far, and he looks at my face, now – his eyes move over my lips, my jaw, my cold pink nose and he smiles as he sees these things as if they half-amaze him. Hello, you …

  We lower the cardboard box to the ground.

  His nose is cold too. He no longer smells of brine but it is still him, still his smell, and it is like no time has passed at all – no weeks and no years. No time has slipped by and yet I put my hands on his cheeks as if to prove to myself that he is here with me – that he is not a dream and I am not sleeping. He smiles as I do this. He knows why I am touching him, and it is at this moment that we feel the snow grow heavier. The flakes are falling thickly now, larger than they were. We both look up. A dark-grey sky.

  I have not yet spoken. There is too much to say, and nothing – both.

  I lead him inside with my ungloved hand.

  Once I had believed that the best parts were gone – that the brightest days and nights of my life were over. I had thought that they, too, dived off Pigeon on an autumn day six years ago and that the life that remained for me was only half a life. I was wrong. We think we will not mend, but we do. Our scars do not go, but they whiten; our bones fuse back into new shapes that work as well as they used to, or nearly. And there are still bright moments – laughter, friends. There will always be laughter and friends.

  I looked at him. I could not stop looking. You’re here. You’re in my house.

  I know.

  And this: we only know the foam … This was Abigail’s saying. She gave it to me for the first time after Tom had gone; I had talked of fairness, or unfairness, and I’d asked her why? Why Tom? She had no answer, of course. There are rarely answers to give and at first I saw no comfort in these small words of hers. But they brought comfort later, and still do. Who can explain this story? Or any other human story? It is an extraordinary world – full of love, grief, coincidence – and we shall never understand it. We should never try to. We should only be grateful for it. I reckon we should love, breathe, and say all will be well and believe it. And we should share our best stories, as often as we can.

  That night, we lay down by the stove – the Fishman and I. We moved under blankets, traced the shapes of our new, fixed bones. How did you find me?

  Sam, he said. I wrote to Sam.

  Ah … I smiled. And I reached up, felt the smoothest skin of him. I felt it with my fingers, with the heel of my hand and I whispered as I did this. Your face …

  Do you mind it? No beard? I could grow it back …

  No – I didn’t mind it. I liked the way he was. I liked the newness of it, as if it was an outward change in keeping with his inner one. Proof, maybe, that he had mended – or enough, at least. I pushed up, kissed him.

  Joe. It is like oh. It is a breath out, a deep sigh.

  And we moved over each other as the sea moves over sea.

  * * *

  He stayed. He did not go away again.

  It snowed for three days; for three days we lived near my stove and talked of our time away from each other. I spoke of beech woods, the letters I’d sent; I listed the things we sold in the shop – hens’ eggs, duck eggs, goose eggs, quail eggs … – and he laughed as I spoke, laughed into my hands. Don’t stop. Tell me – what else do you sell?

  I also tried to find the words for the rural, inland nights – the restfulness of them, their leafy smell. How I’d thought of him in them. I’d look up at the moon, think it is the same one – the same moon that watched Pigeon make her way, that glinted on the low-tide sand. That turned my Fishman’s hair a silvered black.

  He had less to speak of, in some ways. I understood. His past two years had been solitary ones: the walks alone, the reading of old birthday cards, the sudden strike of loss which finds you at the strangest times like waiting at a traffic light or glancing up as a single bird makes its way across the sky. Those long nights spent asking questions of faith. And guilt: he seemed sorry for the word. But I locked my fingers between his and told him how well I knew it – how well I knew the guilt in feeling love again. There is the fear of replacement, which we never wished for.

  It does not mean we love them less, I said.

  He looked down, at our fingers. Maggie …

  I loved – love – how he says my name.

  This small cottage is ours, now. We knocked on the farmer’s door six months ago; he poured us a sherry and he sold the cottage to us with a wave of the hand and a clink of glasses. And so the rooms are our rooms, and the air inside them is our air. When the owl moves through the garden it is, briefly, our owl – Joe’s and mine.

  It is not always easy. Being mended does not mean that we do not miss them; moving on does not mean that the faintest smell of marshmallows or being called Maggie-May does not lead us into a hushed, grey place where there is not room for two. And sometimes in the moments after sex, as Joe and I lie on our sides, my back pressed into the downy dark of his chest so that we are both looking towards the same wall, the same floral curtains with the same view of trees, I think we both think of the people who died, t
he ones that we loved with the wild blissful certainty that we’d love no other in all of our days. In the silence that follows, I think of my late husband. In the silence that follows, he thinks of his late wife. And there will always be sadness, briefly. But then he strengthens his hold, stirs against me and I close my eyes against the white wall, that view of bare trees.

  We carry them with us, Lorcan said. And we do. We breathe for them, sing for them, soak up the stories that they cannot hear. We think they would have loved this … And we smile for them, on their behalf.

  And do we live as they would wish us to? I think so. We have Coralee in the kitchen; we grow our own roses against our south-facing wall. Sometimes a family with copper-red hair comes and we walk with them – down to the river, or across the fields to the town. And in the evenings, I walk into the garden and hear the beat of insects’ wings, or I see the cows drifting, or I remember how Tom looked on our wedding day. I remember how proud I felt to be his wife. And I hope he knows – I know he knows – that I speak of him, I speak of him. He will never be lost or far from me. I tell him that his little crab has grown her second claw.

  * * *

  I write this story. These words you read are my words – my own. Each night since leaving Parla I have sat down in the evenings, pulled my computer to me and typed of sheep with clotted tails, of churches made from salvaged wood, of bird tattoos and coves called Sye, a house with a bright-yellow door. I’ve written of people who’ve had scars or guilt or milky eyes, of secrets so dark that when kept in proper darkness, they are still the darkest part. I’ve typed of salt and the turning light, and how Tap Hole fills to the brim. Of Tabitha’s pearl earrings. Of a red book with gold binding whose pages creak, as they’re turned.

  I write this tale to keep it. For only three people know of the truthful story of the Fishman and me; only three people can speak of it, and we can only speak of it between ourselves. So it might be lost, one day. When we die, it will be gone. And I do not wish for it to be gone.

  So I type – tick-tick go the keys. Logs burn and night falls.

  And this is for him, too. No stone marks Tom’s resting place. There is no monument to prove that he was here at all – that vibrant, kind-eyed, laughing man who met me at The Bounty Inn and, from that moment, changed my life. I find him everywhere, of course. But now, at last, others can. He is in these neat, dark shapes of ink. He is in these cream pages that you lift by their corners, or in the magic of this flat, backlit screen that you hold or lie beside. He is each letter, each space between each word.

  I type. But now I will stop typing. I will stand and make my way upstairs to where my Fishman is. He will, I think, be sleeping – the bedside light will still be on and a book will lie across his chest, half-read. I will lift his reading glasses off his nose. I will fold up the book, lean over him and turn the light out with a click. I will climb in beside him and feel his warmth – this man who came out of the sea.

  The owl calls – can you hear it?

  A fox pads down the lane.

  And can you hear a lighthouse turning? It is far away from here. It sweeps across the island, and it catches the half-closed eyes of roosting birds, the teaspoon resting on its own. There is the brief, small flash of wedding rings. And at this moment – this moment, right now – a flake of silver is falling. It drifts down, settles in the grass. No-one sees it fall. And it will never be found or seen again but it will always be there – in the long, cool grass near Wind Rising.

  Acknowledgements

  I’m very grateful to everyone who helped me during the writing of this book: Sarah Bower, Eamonn Flood, Charlotte Kissack, Peggy MacFarlane, Colin McDonald, Tom McAree and all the Clachaigers, Dean Wiggin – and my family, as always. Thank you.

  About the Author

  SUSAN FLETCHER was born in 1979 in Birmingham. She is the author of the bestselling Eve Green, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, Oystercatchers and Witch Light.

  From the reviews of The Silver Dark Sea:

  ‘Quietly beautiful … poetic, dreamlike prose.’

  FRANCESCA ANGELINI, Sunday Times

  ‘Unashamedly romantic … Fletcher is a careful recorder of the natural world, and The Silver Dark Sea is illuminated by her originality of observation and strong sense of place’

  PAMELA NORRIS, Literary Review

  ‘A wonderfully redemptive story of love and loss, Susan Fletcher’s prose shimmers like light on water, and she’s equally adept at charting the emotions of her memorable characters … Old resentments are revisited, dark secrets are revealed, while barricaded, shut-away hearts let in the possibility of love’

  EITHNE FARRY, Marie Claire

  ‘Fletcher is a powerful storyteller – full-blooded, a bit old-fashioned and with a knack for combining sensual narratives with a feel for ancient myth and natural landscape … Deliciously briny writing’

  CLAIRE ALLFREE, Metro

  ‘Smooth, flowing and feminine, Fletcher’s prose lulls you with its lyricism and emotional resonance … [a] fishy, mythical tale of love and loss and the depths that grief can reach’

  LESLEY MCDOWELL, Herald

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Witch Light

  Oystercatchers

  Eve Green

  Copyright

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith

  London W6 8JB

  This Fourth Estate paperback edition published 2013

  First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2012

  Copyright © Susan Fletcher 2012

  Susan Fletcher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Source ISBN: 9780007321636

  Ebook Edition © March 2013 ISBN: 9780007465095

  Version 2

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

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