Читать книгу The Eyes of the Gull - Margaret Duley - Страница 3

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Isabel Pyke sat on a rock and looked towards the narrow bay. But for brief intervals and recurring days of incredible weather she had seen the same stretch of sea and sky for twenty years. At the age of ten she had begun to grope her way towards her individual dream, and to make the rock on the bare headland her lonely sanctuary: the one place where she could be alone in the stark outport of painted houses, straggling at haphazard spots and angles, on a zigzag road and many lanes.

A solitary house, on a foundation of granite stones, stood on the edge of the bleak promontory. It was a shunned object to the fisherfolk and a dread tale to decades of children. But Isabel Pyke had never heard the pick and hammer associated with it by ghoulish legend, and the only sounds that ever fell on her ears were the mutations of the wind and the guttural notes of the gulls. The only things she ever dreaded in her sanctuary were the ferocious eyes of the gulls! When they hovered low to the Head, she looked towards the horizon for fear of meeting their cold glittering gaze. Should she find herself staring into a pair of yellow eyes, her dream was dispelled for the day. They held the spirit of Helluland: savage, bitter, and chill.

Isabel Pyke had been in spiritual rebellion to Newfoundland all her life. She called it by the name she had learned at school: ‘Helluland, or the Land of Naked Rocks.’ Ever since she could look at picture books she had wanted to go to Spain: to Southern Spain: Cordova, Seville, and Granada. Andalusia! The word syllabicated on her lips with the smooth sensuousness of Uncle Seth’s port wine on Christmas Day. (He had a row of dusty bottles on a shelf, along with red sealed crocks of Guava Jelly, and fresher looking bottles of Bay Rum.) When the old wine had slipped over her palate and eased into her blood, she could voicelessly whisper, ‘Andalusia, Andalusia,’ while her outward consciousness repelled the grating dominance of her mother’s voice laying down the law to Aunt Dorcas and Uncle Seth. But she could mouth it sensuously to herself when sitting on her special rock, and inwardly change the granite garb of her own headlands to a soft bloom of olive, orange, palm, and pomegranate.

Isabel Pyke’s hour of isolation was over. She knew by the position of the sun that it was time to put on the kettle for tea. Her Mother was daily sustained by three large meals and three large snacks; the one snack she prepared for herself being the four-thirty one, when Isabel took her walk on the promontory. She had seen her Mother’s square body reel on its feet once or twice with ‘a dizzy spell’, and Isabel had murmured something about sending up the shore for the doctor. The strong figure had straightened and the dominant voice had grated, ‘nonsense girl, make me a cup of tea,’ thus adding another snack, between a snack and a meal.

Isabel Pyke rose to her feet and the wind lashed her blue cotton dress strongly behind her body, leaving it stark in outline. Her hair blew back tautly from the hair-line, and she stood like a figure-head over a ship’s cutwater. Her hair was light brown and badly cut, her cheek bones Slavic in shape under wide eyes, the colour of clear water: the lashes were black against golden skin. She turned away from the sea, and the wind dishevelled her hair and dress to savage disarray. For a moment she faced the house with its dusty windows and stopped abruptly in shocked amazement. A sombrely dressed man was walking up the steps to the faded front door! Who could be entering the Head House? Her feet stayed rooted by the unexpected sight. Many times since her childhood she had run up the crumbling steps to look in the filmy windows, but old furniture stood changeless in increasing dust. Only the yellow-eyed gulls and herself knew it, and no human footfall but her own had ever ventured so far. When the partridge-berry pickers swarmed over the Head they always stopped short of the house and the berries around it ripened and withered.

The sun told Isabel there was no time to linger in speculation, and movement returned to her feet. Her Mother was a martinet of routine. Time to her was stomach time, and more accurately registered than their Grandfather’s clock.

Isabel trod the trackless scrub of the Head until she came to a rutted grass grown road, and walked a long mile to the small outport with its one road and many lanes. She made her way between a curving beach and a narrow railroad track, towards a crooked lane holding five houses at different oblique angles. The fifth was her Mother’s lying behind thick lilac and syringa, which obscured the lower windows and tapped against the clap-board. The buzz of flies accompanied her up the pebbled walk, and myriad blue-bottles shone darkly azure on the white front of the wooden house. The July light was warm and golden. As she stepped from it to the dimness of the narrow hall she heard voices coming from the dining-room. Fresh from the wind on the Head, its snug stuffiness invaded her nostrils, and she longed to let the air blow round the plush covered table, the armchairs, and the Grandfather’s clock that had ticked its way through many years. Her Mother’s strong brown eyes looked from it to her.

‘You’re late Bella trapesing over that Head.’

Her Mother’s voice was like the granite rocks of Helluland: hard, sharp, and jagged.

Her Aunt Dorcas’s voice flowed benignly over her. It held the roundness of Andalusia.

‘Let her be, Emily. There’s no hurry my maid.’

‘No hurry indeed! Just like you Dork not to eat regular! Bella, here’s your Aunt Mary Ann from Lunenburg: your Aunt Dorcas’s sister-in-law. She came in on the train a week back.’

As Isabel’s dazzled eyes cleared to observation she saw the third black figure. She had often heard of Aunt Mary Ann in Nova Scotia. She was the wife of Aunt Dorcas’s elder brother Joe, who had gone to sea in a Lunenburg schooner. As Isabel went forward to greet her she was drawn to a kiss from thin lips, lost to fullness from early false teeth. The nearness of the black figure came to her nostrils like the stuffiness of the room. She heard a flat voice raised on a query.

‘Well now, Emily, is this your girl? She don’t favour your family.’

‘No, she’s not a Wilkes,’ grated Mrs. Pyke accusingly.

‘She’s like her own good Father,’ smoothed her Aunt Dorcas, with a smile from deep brown eyes.

‘Well, I’ve heard about you all from Joe. ’Tis real nice to see you.’

‘He couldn’t stay in his own country to know his own folks,’ Mrs. Pyke informed her.

Aunt Dorcas’s serene remark toned down the grating challenge. ‘He did well for himself Emily, did Joe. He was always a good boy.’

‘Maybe, Dorcas Penney, and maybe not. Bella girl, look spry now. Your Aunts are staying to tea. Open a crock of number one preserve, and cut the black fruit cake—the one with ten eggs.’

Isabel obeyed automatically. Her Mother’s personality had never gone past her ear. She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove standing on sail canvas painted Chinese red. A sleeping cat made a dusky lump on its crimson surface. Mrs. Pyke’s dirty teacup lay on a white scrubbed table, beside a small plate, brown with rich crumbs.

Boiled ham, leaves of lettuce, red radishes, scalded cream, number one preserve, bread and butter, lay on the table together.

Mrs. Pyke ate rapidly, filling up her mouth until her lips were pursed out over her teeth. Then she bolted, washing down the remains of a mouthful with a draught of dark brown tea.

Aunt Dorcas’s movements evinced a heavy fluidity. She was large, bovine, and benign, and her hands moved over her food with slow deliberation. She suggested a great cow, dragging home a bursting udder.

Aunt Mary Ann took brief sips of tea with her little finger stuck out from the cup. She wore a black dress of shiny satin with a string of glass beads. The dress had a deep V-shaped neck which showed an expanse of wrinkled skin. Beside the high concealing bodices of Mrs. Pyke and Mrs. Penney she seemed revealed in ugly nakedness. Isabel turned her eyes away, and tried to shut her ears to the bolting and sucking noises of her Mother’s eating and drinking. She ate moderately with her wide eyes unseeing.

‘You’re not eating much my maid,’ came the voice of her Aunt Dorcas. It had always been the same: unalterable and unchangeable: like infinity.

Isabel’s Mother answered for her. ‘She was always a pale pilgarlick like her Father. He had to leave the sea for his stomach, and lay down sudden to illness. The day he died I cooked my first onion in ten year.’ (Isabel remembered the smell of the onion and white lilac mixed together.)

Aunt Dorcas never heeded personalities. They flowed from her mind like drops from a pane. Her cousin Emily had thrown herself against her profound serenity all her life. The slow bovine eyes turned towards her, ‘Emily, I hear the Head House is let.’

The fact was so incredible that Mrs. Pyke stopped eating. She withdrew a piece of fruit cake from her mouth and the black wedge showed the print of strong teeth.

‘Nonsense, Dork, ’tis not fit for a pigsty.’

‘ ’Twas strongly built, Emily, and has stood to the wind. ’Tis so that it’s let. Simeon Pyke told me as I crossed the beach.’

‘All the fools are not dead yet,’ grated Mrs. Pyke returning the wedge of fruit cake to her mouth.

Isabel’s mind had leaped to attention. They did not know her familiarity with the Head House! They thought she took a daily walk on the promontory and inevitably stopped short of it. The black figure she had seen on the decaying steps! Was her sanctuary to be invaded? For so many years only the wind had known it, and the yellow-eyed gulls. She strained to hasten the slow detail of her aunt’s voice.

‘There’s a foreign fellow staying at Lydia Rumsden’s. He got the key from Simeon and asked him to find women to clean the house.’

Mrs. Pyke’s laugh was a bark. ‘And did he get them?’ she asked.

Mrs. Penney shook her head slowly. ‘They wouldn’t go Emily, they wouldn’t go, though there’s nothing to fear to them that love the Lord.’

‘The love of the Lord hasn’t taken away the fear of that house, Dork.’

‘They don’t love enough, Emily, they don’t love enough.’

‘Maybe not, Dorcas Penney, but there’s those that say the sound of the pick and the hammer will rise above the love of the Lord.’

Mary Ann Wilkes, from Lunenburg, looked from one to the other. The serene comfort of her sister-in-law was moderated by the square presence of her cousin Emily, whose piercing eyes seemed to fasten on her neck and accuse it of immodesty; and now this strange conversation! Mary Ann fingered her glass beads with the desire to turn them into a scarf. In spite of the stuffiness of the room there were draughts on the back of her neck. Her own voice came thinly to her ears. ‘And why wouldn’t they clean the house, Emily? Think a body would be glad to earn a few cents these days.’

Mrs. Pyke’s grating scorn reduced her, and now she felt silly as well as immodest.

‘Money for scraping dirt from Head House, Mary Ann! ’Tis money too dearly earned.’

‘Has it a bad name?’ she asked timidly.

Mrs. Pyke sucked up a last draught of tea, sweet from the moist remains of three teaspoons of sugar. She put her cup in its saucer with a final click, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘ ’Tis well known you don’t live in these parts, Mary Ann. The house is known the length of the shore. Sixty year ago——’

Isabel pushed back her chair with a sudden scrape. She knew it all by heart! Her Mother glared, but her Aunt Dorcas asked kindly, ‘can I help you clear my maid?’

Her Mother answered for her. ‘That you won’t, Dorcas Penney! We had our day. Let the young wait on the old.’

Aunt Mary Ann left the table and sat nervously upright on a stiff sofa by the Nottingham lace curtains. Mrs. Pyke stayed in her place, distorting her mouth and letting her tongue cleanse the area between her lips and her teeth. Aunt Dorcas rose ponderously to her feet and her slow hands piled dishes for Isabel’s tray.

Mrs. Pyke left the table and placed herself in a faded armchair facing her cousin-in-law from Lunenburg. Her brown eyes with their hairy brows discovered every wrinkle on the naked neck. The draughts became increasingly evident.

‘Ain’t you cold, Mary Ann, with your low dress?’

‘No, no, Emily,’ she said hastily, grasping the glass beads. ‘ ’Tis warmish of a summer in Lunenburg. Tell me about the queer house.’

Mrs. Pyke’s eyes left the neck and she settled herself for a long recital.

Isabel left the room erect with the weight of the heavy tray.

‘Sixty year ago——’

‘Come Michaelmas, Emily,’ prompted her cousin fumbling with her large hands for the creases on the white cloth.

‘Sixty year ago come Michaelmas, Dorcas Penney, and the year after you were born, Captain Pyke, Josiah Pyke, came back from a long foreign voyage. I mind the time my Mother first told me the story. He was going to be married to a poor pilgarlick like my Isabel——’

‘My own Mother told me she was a pretty thing, Emily, and she wrote a bit of poetry.’ Mrs. Penney’s slow moving figure came to rest in another armchair with her large hands folded serenely in her lap.

Mrs. Pyke snorted. ‘Poetry indeed! Pure trash! If she’d been my daughter I’d have knocked the poetry out of her.’

Mrs. Penny continued with profound detachment. ‘They were going to be married on Twelfth Night.’ But her cousin’s grating voice demanded the narrative.

‘The girl was a Tucker: Elfrieda Tucker, and a poor sawney crowd the lot of them! This one was keeping company with Josiah a two year, but for ten month he’d been away in China and other heathen parts——’

‘The Chinese are coming to the way of the Lord, Emily. The foreign missions——’

‘Maybe so, Dorcas Penney, not that I hold with going out to the heathen when the heathen are at our own front door, but a lot could have been converted since then. This was sixty year ago.’ Her brown eyes pierced her cousin-in-law from Lunenburg, who sat up stiffer in her chair. ‘Josiah came up the Bay, Mary Ann, one winter morning, and what did he find?’ Mary Ann fingered her glass beads again, but no answer was required. ‘And what did he find? He found, Mary Ann——’ (the grating voice paused for a second). ‘He found his worthless bride-to-be dead in a new grave, of a still-born child.’

‘Ain’t that sad, Emily,’ said her cousin-in-law from Lunenburg in a flat voice. ‘Josiah’s child?’

‘Have sense, woman! Didn’t I just tell you Josiah had been away a ten month? No, Mary Ann, not a soul knows to this day who the fellow was. She was a poor thin thing, not built for child bearing, and no one knew she was that way until she was on her time.’

‘The poor girl held on to the name of the father.’

‘That she did, Dorcas Penney, and he never got his deserts. She died with the secret locked up inside her.’

‘What did Josiah do, Emily?’ questioned Mary Ann Wilkes still with her hands on her glass beads.

‘Do, Mary Ann, and what did he do? He went rearin’ about like a wild thing: running through the lanes and asking everyone for the name of the man.’

‘And taking the name of the Lord in vain.’ Mrs. Penney’s head shook with slow regret.

‘And what if he did, Dorcas Penney? He had good reason, but before the day was done, Mary Ann, the people were fair sick of his voice, and they went in and bolted their doors against him. But then what did he do? He waited until every lamp was blown out and crept into the graveyard with a pick and dug her up.’

Mrs. Wilkes, from Lunenburg, said with triumphant intelligence. ‘ ’Tis a crime, Emily, to desecrate a grave.’

‘And don’t you think we know that, Mary Ann? We may not live in a great country like Canada, but I hope we know the difference between right and wrong?’

Dorcas Penney said with slow forbearance, ‘perhaps he didn’t know what he was doing, the poor fellow.’

‘Didn’t he indeed? He dug her up to see if there was any token in her coffin: and when he didn’t find one he shook the dead thing until her head cracked against the ice. ’Twas a white moonlight night, and a couple that was living close by, saw him clear as day. They were afraid to go out; he sounded that wild, but they waited until he was gone and then went across the graves and found the dead creature with her face turned up to the sky and her shoulders froze to the ground.’

‘I hope he was arrested, Emily. ’Tis horrible.’

‘Haven’t I told you we know the law as well as you do? Yes, he was arrested but he got off. They thought he was cracked, and so he was with what he did after. He gave up his ship and took with him the ship’s carpenter, a dreadful ugly fellow with one eye. He was a Covey duck from down the Shore. The pair of them went out to the Head and built a house: built it with their own hands, digging and hauling, cutting and sawing, beating and hammering, and the folks said they could hear it all across the Bay. Josiah was never seen in the village again until he went across the beach to be buried not far from Elfrieda. I can remember the day, and how we always hid whenever Coveyduck went to the Store. Every child ran as fast as its legs could carry it.’

‘What happened to him when Josiah died?’

‘Now you’re asking. No one ever knew. He came to the store once after Josiah’s funeral, and then a long time went by. They thought he must be starved so Simeon Pyke’s father (who was the nearest kin to Josiah) walked out to see what ailed him. He found the house neat and tidy, but shockin’ bare, and never a sign of Coveyduck. From that day to this, his disappearance is just as great a mystery as the name of the fellow who got Elfrieda into trouble. Some say Josiah called Coveyduck away, others think he wandered down the Shore, and there’s them that say he fell over the Head and drowned natural like, but the tide never washed up his body.’

‘But that doesn’t explain the sound of the pick and hammer.’

‘ ’Tis said the haunt on the house comes from the rage that Josiah hammered into the walls, and when the wind is low, the echo of it still comes across the Bay, and the sound of the pick digging on hard ground begins in the graveyard.’

Mary Ann Wilkes gave a flat Nova Scotian laugh. ‘You’re too cut off from the world, Emily. That’s why you cling to stories like that.’

Mrs. Pyke’s eyes found the wrinkled neck again. ‘And I suppose Lunenburg is London, New York, and Paris?’

Dorcas Penney flowed on like smooth oil. ‘Emily, I think like Mary Ann. ’Tis an unnatural tale we’ve built up ourselves, and its wrong to pass it on to every lot of children. If we walked out to the house like we walk across the beach the story would soon die away. But,’ she sighed profoundly, ‘it’s a long walk and the wind is strong.’

Mrs. Pyke snorted. ‘Wind or no wind, Dorcas Penney, there’s no one stoppin’ you if you want to take that walk. ’Tis like you indeed to wait till you can only get the length of the beach.’

Mary Ann Wilkes from Lunenburg released her hold on her glass beads and said with nervous decision, ‘don’t you think we’d better be going, Dorcas?’

‘You’re right, Mary Ann. Seth will be wondering what’s keeping us, and you’ll be busy the week visitin’ the folks.’

‘Nonsense, Dork. Sit right down, Mary Ann, and stop a bit longer. I want to hear which of the folks is doing things for you. You must come to tea proper when I’m more prepared.’

‘Thank you,’ she murmured nasally, looking towards her sister-in-law. But her heavy figure still rested serenely, and her brown eyes gazed back kindly at the expanse of wrinkled neck. Mary Ann sat down again.

‘That’s right now. You couldn’t go anyway without a cup of tea. Bella!’ Mrs. Pyke’s voice was raised on a loud note, ‘Bella!’

‘Yes, Mother,’ came quietly through the thin partition.

‘Bella, make a pot of tea th’ once. Your Aunts are goin’ early. I must say you’re mighty slow with your dishes. Think you had to wash up for a regiment.’

Isabel had lingered in the crimson-floored kitchen. When her dishes were washed and the place tidied away she had gone to the back door and watched the sea dim to grey, and the old house on the Head become blurred in outline. She wondered what she would find to-morrow. Her Mother’s voice reached her easily in the back yard and she took quick long steps to the crimson-floored kitchen.

When Isabel had steeped the sixth and final brew of tea she was free to go to her room under the slanting roof. She closed the door and her body relaxed with a soft sigh. The wind blew in from the Bay and brought a smell of drying fish. The honeycomb spread and white lace curtains were blue-white like the ice which came down from the North.

With a jug of boiling water, diluted with icy well water, Isabel carefully washed her golden-coloured body in a white china basin. In the light of the crescent flame from the kerosene lamp her slim figure made elongated shadows on the papered walls. She put on a plain nainsook night-dress and extracted a bottle of olive oil from a drawer of scant contents. Slowly she rubbed the smooth fluid all over her face and neck, lingering with slow strokes around the eyes. (Some day she would go to Andalusia, and she couldn’t take the leather skin of outport Helluland. The dark-eyed Andalusians were full of soft-skinned loveliness, and she always thought of them dancing in fiestas under hot yellow sun.)

Before slipping into bed Isabel counted a roll of notes concealed in the folds of a Chinese dressing-gown, brought her by Uncle Seth. Eighty-five dollars! It was growing! Andalusia! She closed her eyes and imagined the sun on her body, and the orange trees in bud. With a sigh she replaced the notes and extracted a book, and slipped under the blue-white spread. With the kerosene lamp beside her she began to read. ‘Seville is the Paris of Andalusia, the gayest city of all Spain. Glittering like a jewel on the banks of the Guadalquivir, environed by orange-groves and palms, and glowing like a sun——’