Читать книгу Light - Margaret Elphinstone - Страница 9

CHAPTER 3

THE COCK WAS CROWING IN THE YARD, OUT THERE WHERE the heat flattened the parched ground. It was so hot outdoors one could hardly draw a breath. In here it was cool. She could smell the tamarind tree that cast its shadow over the steps in a pattern of leaves that sometimes moved in the breeze. There was no breeze today. Today the tree shadows were as still as if they’d been carved in clay like the jali. Where she was standing, the sunlight made a sharply-etched latticework on the marble floor of the veranda, an exact echo of the intricate patterns of the jali through which it shone. When she shut her eyes the pattern was still there, emblazoned in green and gold. The marble was cool under her feet. Her sandals were on the step. She squatted down to shake them, and an enormous scorpion fell out. She screamed and dropped the sandal. And a voice called from inside the house: she was about to hear the comforting voice from inside the house: she could remember the different sounds, the very words, almost … almost …

The cock crowed again. Diya rolled over, and woke. A shaft of sun pierced the crack in the shutter. It fell right across the pillow where she’d been lying. The sea soughed against the rocks outside; she could hear it through the open window. At home in Grandmother’s house Diya used to look out at the sea from her white bed under the rafters through the small square window of her top-floor room. She’d been able to see the whole of Castletown Bay over the top of the Garrison chapel. But that window, like all the windows in Grandmother’s house, had been kept firmly closed. Here on Ellan Bride Lucy always kept the window open unless the wind was very strong. Diya had been forced to grow used to the unhealthy practice. Jim used to keep the window open too. In the beginning Diya had been frightened by the night air, laden with demons of the deep, smelling of salt and wind, stealing in through the perilous crack.

Diya didn’t want the weather in her dreams, still less the sea. She could hear the sea now, and the sound of it seemed to brush her dream into oblivion. She tried to recapture the receding images, but they were dissolving in the relentless freshness of the island. She could smell salt all too plainly; in the dream it had been tamarind … the warm, spicy smell of the tamarind tree. What was gone, was gone for ever; only faint shadows might fall from the past into the present, and even those were merely an illusion.

Sometimes when Jim had been there he’d left the light burning by itself and come to her, briefly, in their curtained bed in the kitchen recess – his parents had slept in the bedroom then – but Diya knew that Jim was never unaware, even for a moment, of the steady beam of light outside the window. While the light was lit he would not sleep. He would come, on a calm night, and then, just as she was falling asleep, he would go again. She always woke with an empty place beside her. Now Lucy had Jim’s half of the bed, and Jim was gone for ever.

They’d been so helpless. Exposed to all the fury of the elements, this island could – and too often did – turn itself in no time at all into a little hell on earth. That night five years ago had been worse than hell. In hell one despaired, and that was all. Hope was more cruel because it tantalised: it would seem to offer a glimmer of light, and then it would just blow itself away again in a night, leaving only destruction behind it. That was why the wind was the worst of all. Rain, mist, hail, fog, sleet: of all the elements that flung themselves against the island the wind was the real demon. It mocked you as it swept your strength away – you couldn’t breathe, you couldn’t balance, you couldn’t even think. Diya hated the wind more than anything else in the world.

The wind that had swept Jim away that night had shaken the house so hard it made the stone walls shudder as if this were a house of cards. It had whined under the door, lifting the rag rug as if it were an animal come alive. When Diya had tried to look out for Jim’s lantern, the shutter had jerked loose from her hand and been wrenched off its hinge. When the shutter banged against the wall, the cat had fled under the dresser, and the baby had woken up screaming.

Billy had screamed too; Diya could remember that: ‘Mam! Mam!’

‘Da!’ Breesha had cried. ‘I want my Da!’

‘I’ll go after him.’ Lucy had jumped up and pulled on her cloak. She’d draped the heavy coil of rope over her shoulder, and lit the storm lantern from the candle.

Diya hadn’t known whether to try to stop her or not. The truth was she’d wanted her to go. She’d wanted Lucy to risk her life, if it would bring back Jim. ‘Take care!’

The door was snatched out of Diya’s hand as soon as she’d raised the latch. The wind howled. Ashes flew up from the hearth, and the coals roared into a blaze. The candle had gone out. Both children had been sobbing as Lucy vanished into the swirling dark. What else could Diya have done but shove the door shut with all the strength she had? The wind groaned against it, protesting. But she’d managed to shut it out.

‘Billy! Breesha!’ She’d hung the nightgowns over the back of the wooden settle, just the same as usual. Why had she even bothered, when all the time …? But all she’d been able to think of was keeping things as ordinary as possible. ‘What foolishness is this!’ – that was more or less what she’d said – ‘Silly children! On land there is nothing to fear. You should pray for the poor sailors, at sea on such a night as this!’

‘I want my Da!’

Diya remembered how her hands had shaken as she’d unbuttoned their clothes, and pulled the warm nightgowns over their heads. She hadn’t tried to make them go to bed. The whole house was shuddering. The roof beams groaned under the strain. The three of them had huddled in one blanket on the hearth while the coals blazed in the wind, and spray spattered down the chimney. Breesha was cuddling the cat tightly. All the time Diya had kept one hand on the cradle; the baby slept through everything.

At last the door had burst open. Jim!

No, not Jim. Lucy’s hood had blown off. Her hair was soaked. She’d got blood on her face. She didn’t have the rope or lantern. She’d tried to push the door to: Diya had run to help her. Together they’d managed it, while the wind battered on the outside with giant fists.

‘Where’s Jim?’

‘I can’t get down there! I can’t get down!’

‘Where’s Jim?’

‘I can’t get down! The sea is right over the island!’

‘But where’s Jim?’

‘I don’t know, I tell you! I can’t get down!’ And then Lucy, who never cried – even now, Diya had never seen Lucy cry – had held her hands over her face, and drawn long shuddering breaths, as if the wind had done its best to suffocate her.

That was enough! No point going back to the past, any of it. Diya lay for a few moments watching dust motes dance in the thin shaft of sunlight. Lucy must have doused the light long ago. A harsh scraping sound started up in the room next door. Lucy was raking out the fire. Diya heard voices: Lucy’s low and quiet, and Breesha’s shrill treble. Diya pushed back the cover, and swung her legs out of bed.

Mally was like her mother in the mornings, slow to start. She was curled up like a dormouse under her flowered coverlet in the truckle bed in the corner. Mally had no jobs to do until after breakfast, so no one ever bothered to wake her. She didn’t stir when Diya fastened the shutter back and the sunlight flooded in, chasing away the blue shadows, and turning the whitewashed walls the colour of pale honey. Apart from the sleeping child the room was empty. Diya pulled her nightgown over her head as she crossed to the washstand. She poured water from the blue jug into the matching basin, took a rough bar of soap and a flannel, and carefully washed and dried herself with a threadbare towel.

The Gaffer had made this washstand. The table top was laid with blue and white Dutch tiles that came from a wreck at Langness in the year Jim was born. The ship was on its way from Lancaster to the West Indies, and all the crew had been lost, though bits of the cargo had been salvaged later. The tiles were found in a wooden box inside the broken hull when Jim’s father and grandfather had sailed over to have a look at her. Diya loved the tiles, with their neat blue and white pictures of windmills, cattle and ships. There was so little man-made beauty here, such poverty of patterns and images; every little bit was like a drop of manna.

Diya, in her petticoat, stood at the oval looking glass above the chest of drawers and brushed her long hair. The swishing sound, Mally thought as she woke, was like the sea; in fact Mally could hear the sea now, echoing her mother’s brushing, outside on the rocks.

Diya poured two drops of oil from a thick glass bottle on to her palm and rubbed her hands together. Then she ran them through her hair in long strokes, turning her head first one way and then the other, still watching herself dreamily in the looking glass. The gold studs in her ears flashed in the glass as she turned her head. Now this letter had come, Diya was thinking, something else would happen. She was frightened: she couldn’t deny it. She had no money. Neither of them had any money. Lucy’s salary was eighteen pounds a year, two-thirds of what Jim’s had been. That was incomparably greater than Island wages. Lucy’s salary was all they had to keep them. They had no home but this. Diya could work, only who would have her? And what about Lucy? And how could Diya go into service when she had Breesha and Mally? No one would employ a housekeeper or a governess who brought two children with her. And whatever would Grandmother have said if she’d known Diya had sunk to that? What would either of her grandmothers have said, come to that? Better not to even begin to think of that, not to open the sealed door to that long-gone world.

Even so, the future would be easier for her than it could be for Lucy. There was no point in pretending otherwise. At least Diya knew how to live in other ways. That didn’t mean she wasn’t afraid. There had been so many changes, and she had learned exactly how much each change could hurt. Liverpool dock: a grisly sea of faces. All the faces blank and white, like a picture not coloured in. And the appalling rain, the thin grey relentless rain. Was this sea of whiteness also people? The colour they made was terrible, thin and grey and utterly relentless. And there was no sun.

Diya twisted her long coil of hair into a knot at the nape of her neck, and fastened it with hairpins. Mally, watching through half-closed eyes, loved the darkness of her mother’s hair against the bleached whiteness of her petticoat. She was aware of the suppleness of her mother’s body, and the way the petticoat extinguished it, even while it still showed what her mother looked like underneath by the folds in it, and the way it touched her body here and there.

Diya put on a blue print gown over the petticoat, and a white cap that hid her hair. Immediately she became her ordinary daytime self. Mally didn’t quite realise that her mother now looked ten years older; she only knew that her mother was different when day came, and that her undressed self was Mam’s own secret, which Mally only saw because she happened to be there. Aunt Lucy, unlike Mam, didn’t bother to wear a cap. She said it would blow off in the wind, and who was there to see or care? Mally watched her mother slide her silver bangle onto her wrist, glance for one last time in the looking glass, and turn to face the day.

When Diya had left the room there was no need to pretend to be still asleep. Mally rolled on her back and stretched out luxuriously. She dimly remembered having Breesha in the bed as well. She remembered fighting for space and Breesha jerking the covers off her, but she could also remember waking curled up against her sister like two kittens in a box. Mally could not remember her Da. Sometimes Breesha or Billy mentioned him, and more often Mam would tell them stories about him. In Mally’s mind the stories about her Da were as remote as India. Although he’d actually been there on the island with them all until Mally herself was almost two, in her mind Jim belonged to the happy times before she was born, the times which other people remembered, in which she’d had no share.

When Diya went through to the kitchen she left the door ajar behind her. The door used to creak, but Lucy had rubbed soap on the hinges and now it made no protesting noise. The sounds through the open door would wake Mally in due course, thought Diya, as they always did, and Mally would join them when she smelt breakfast.

Lucy was blowing last night’s coals back into a blaze. Smokey the cat was rubbing against her arm, clearly hoping to be fed. Breesha was standing there in her nightgown, but when she saw her mother she grabbed her clothes from the back of a chair, and disappeared into the bedroom to wash and dress. The two women in the kitchen could hear her shouting at Mally. ‘Get up, you lazy pig!’

‘I’m not a pig!’

The bedroom door banged.

Billy emerged from behind the kitchen bed-curtain, knuckling his eyes. He was buttoning his shirt when his mother called from the hearth without turning round, ‘Billy, are you getting washed? Remember to wash your neck! There’s a tide mark there as big as the one on Stackey beach!’

Billy sighed as he poured water from an earthenware jug into an enamel bowl. No one was watching, so washing took him less than half a minute. He dragged the comb through his curly hair. He was darker than Lucy, but he’d inherited her thick curls and her freckles. His eyes were not like hers though; Lucy had grey-green eyes, but Billy’s were bright blue and very wide open, giving him an air of startled innocence. Billy fastened his breeks with a wide leather belt that was much too long for him. Lucy had helped him cut an extra hole in it. The belt had been Uncle Jim’s. Billy treasured every small item that he had inherited from Uncle Jim. A leather belt, a beaver hat for special occasions, both far too large for him, were small icons to Uncle Jim’s memory and to Billy’s status in a family of females. Jim’s shirts had long ago been unpicked and remade for children’s nightgowns and women’s petticoats. Jim’s Sunday blacks, seldom worn, were put away in camphor for when Billy was a man. Jim had been wearing his oilskin jacket on the night it had happened, so they didn’t have that. Billy kept Uncle Jim’s second-best knife in its leather sheath under his pillow, and wore it for fishing and other jobs. The telescope they all used, because they had to for the light. But Billy cared about that telescope more than any of them. It was more his than anyone else’s, or so he reckoned.