Читать книгу The Silver Dark Sea - Susan Fletcher - Страница 9

The sky begins to lighten a little after four. In the east, there is a feathered grey, the softest of yellows. The daylight moves across the sea.

At nearly five, it comes to the eastern cliffs – the half-moon harbour, the towers of rock. The seabirds that roost here – fulmars, herring gulls – blink as the sunlight finds them. They bring their beaks down to their chests, and preen.

At the island’s south-eastern point is the main harbour. Slowly, its water turns from black to blue. Light moves along the old sea wall, the railings of the Morning Star and the smaller boats that are moored there – Calypso, Sea Fairy, Lady Caroline. Their ropes shine with hanging weed. The windows of the harbourmaster’s house glint, so that the child who sleeps behind them sniffs and turns onto her side, away from the light. There is a young man in this house who has not slept. He lies on his back, stares.

Above the harbour, on its south side, lies the Old Fish Store. It has a black slate roof – the sunlight strikes the nearest side of it. This is a squat, rectangular house. It is cold, too, as it needed to be in the days when the fish were kept here, laid out in a line. No fish in it now. Instead, two people lie in their bed with two blankets on. She sleeps, but he is stirring. He can hear the house creak, as it warms.

On with the sunlight.

A lane heads west, inland. It leaves the quayside and climbs past the ragwort, past the stones walls that have fallen, mostly, so that sheep step across them or nestle in their hollowed parts. These stones have lichen on them – as yellow as yolk, and lace-like – and they grow more yellow as the sunlight comes. The lane passes a picnic table and a phone box. There is a viewpoint here, with a large wooden board that names the other islands that can be seen from this spot – Utta, Cantalay, far-off Merme. By day, there are always tourists here, hands on their hips as they read it. But not now – not at this moment. It is too early. There are only sparrows and their short, burred flight.

The ground begins to flatten out. The island stretches ahead. The lane runs past more ragwort and a few small, blackened circles of earth where campfires have been, for this is the island’s wild camping ground. The isle’s airstrip is here too. It is rarely used: it exists for emergencies or when the sea is so rough that the Morning Star cannot sail and supplies on the island run low. A wooden hut says Welcome to Parla but salt has blistered its paint.

After this, there is the crossroads. It’s small – a place where four dusty tracks meet each other, where most of the island’s homes cluster like barnacles. Here, too, is the tiny primary school with its chalked snake drawn in the playground. It has hopscotch squares and a single swing; its roof is cherry-red. The school has five windows and in each one there is a letter, cut from coloured card. PARLA. The sunshine lights these letters up. It lights, also, the metal boot scraper outside the house next door. This house is the schoolteacher’s; the only Bundy daughter lives here with her husband and son. Also, it is one of the few homes with trees: there are birches and an apple tree which no longer bears fruit. Bird feeders hang from them, for George loves his birds. They are what brought him here, to this island; they are also what led him to Hester – which makes him love his birds even more. At this moment, they are both sleeping. But the birds are awake and they squabble on the feeders, spill seed onto the ground.

The church is also here. It is wooden, white-painted, with a cross on its roof. The minister’s house is wooden also but it remains wood-coloured and its wood is splintery. It has a trellis with ivy growing on it so that its door is half-hidden by its bottle-coloured leaves. They brush the minister’s bald head when he goes in or out. He – Lorcan – has counted the steps it takes him to get from his bed to the altar and it is thirty-seven. He can hear the latch on the church door being opened, as he lies in his bath.

Parla Stores sits by a rhododendron bush. The shop is cave-like, inside – its shelves brim with tins, jars, bottles. There are also picnic tables outside, and an awning. There is no pub on Parla but this is the nearest thing to it. Milton sells beer, wine and spirits and turns a blind eye to locals sitting under his awning with aluminium cans. He likes hearing their laughter, coming through the door; he feels proud, somehow, to hear it – as if they have come here to see him. And Milton is proud of his noticeboard for amongst the ferry times and useful phone numbers he has pinned a plastic folder with leaflets inside – a map of Parla, self-guided tours, a little natural history, Things to See and Do. He is proud because he wrote them. They are all his work – typed out, and folded.

The crossroads is the heart of the island. The school, the shop, the half-pub and the church, all side by side. It is where the news is, where the stories are passed on.

South of here, the lane grasses over. It winds down past the island’s graveyard and its long blackthorn hedge to Lowfield. The sun barely finds this house for it is hidden by grass and gorse. The banks of earth beside it are so high that sheep have stepped onto its roof, or so the nurse tells it. But the sun finds her bicycle and its bell. Beyond Lowfield, there is Tavey – the pig farm where no-one lives now. The pigs are gone and its people too. For years it has been empty yet its furniture stands under dust-sheets, as if expecting to be used any day now. Nettles grow freely in these parts. In the nettle patch near Litty there are voles – anxious, with eyes like polished pins. They dart into undergrowth like gunshots. The lane ends on a shingle beach.

North of the crossroads, the island rises up. It gathers height quickly. After the school, the grass becomes sharper and thistles grow by the roadside. Here, the sheep are more plentiful. They lift up from the lane with their swinging, clotted tails. The first house is High Haven – a small farmhouse down a single track. It has a wood-pile under tarpaulin and four cars in its driveway, all without tyres, or engines, or doors, but Nathan keeps them all the same. It is in his nature, perhaps – to keep, to store. He hates loss; he has lost enough things. He looks at these old cars, now. Nathan is awake – he has barely slept – and he stands in the kitchen with a mug of tea and an aspirin on his tongue. He swallows the pill with a toss of his head, and stares at the empty wheel-arches. Beyond, he can see Wind Rising. It’s the biggest farmhouse, and the oldest. Nathan grew up there. Now, his brother’s family live in it – he sees the open-sided barn, the row of Calor gas bottles, the silage in black bales. Their dog is scratching her ear with her hind leg and Nathan can hear her chain ringing, or he thinks he can. He looks at his wristwatch; not yet six.

The woman at Easterly is also awake. Her cottage is beyond High Haven, along the same track so she must pass those cars propped up on bricks whenever she leaves her home. She does not like those cars, and she’s told Nathan this. But why would he listen? At this precise moment, she stands in her dressing gown. She rubs rose-scented hand cream into her hands as she waits for the toast to pop up, and she thinks of her children, or those that are left. Emmeline lists them – Ian, Hester, Nathan. Her hands tell the story of a life on a farm – age spots, scars, papery skin on the backs of them – and she turns them over, studying.

The lane keeps rising. The north is the wildest part of the isle – the gorse is wind-bent, and the ditches are deep. In winter it is a harsh place, not made for life. But in the summer, the skylarks sing down upon it and to kneel and touch the earth is to feel its warmth. It is sunlit here, now. Here, at the island’s highest point, all the coasts can be seen. A house with a yellow door perches in the north-east corner, near the cliff edge. It has gulls on its roof and tomato plants in its porch and its name is carved into driftwood – Crest, propped by the door. The woman who lives here is brushing her teeth. She is in her early forties but looks older somehow. She bends down to the sink, spits.

After this, there is only the lighthouse. Its lantern is, now, sleeping. So, too, is the girl who lives at its base, who has turned the old lighthouse-keepers’ quarters into a tea room and a few hostel rooms. She has worked hard for it. She sleeps on her front, in a floral vest and knickers that match. As the sunlight finds the back wall of her room, her alarm clock goes off and she stretches, rubs her eyes. Six fifteen. Rona could do with more sleep but she has plenty to do – breakfast, linen, fresh scones, her accounts. She tells herself this, as she turns off the alarm: get up. A new day. In theory anything could happen but Rona is pretty sure it won’t.

* * *

Parla wakes slowly. It stretches, lowers a foot from its bed.

In Wind Rising, the top of an orange juice carton is pulled apart. Constance wears an oversized man’s pyjama shirt that reaches her knees and a pair of walking socks. Her hair was black, once – raven-black, almost blue; now she has streaks of grey in it. Like a misty night, she tells herself. It is her reassurance.

She pours the juice. A man?

At Sye.

Dead?

Nope, he’s alive. Or he was last night.

Who is he?

No idea. Without taking his eyes off the paper, Ian bites into his toast.

None?

He was barely conscious – he says this with his mouth full. We couldn’t ask him much.

She looks out of the window, drinks. Constance was almost asleep when her husband returned last night. He’d climbed in beside her, beer-smelling, and she’d thought to ask what happened tonight? Where? But he’d been snoring promptly. He’d lain on his back, slept deeply, and so Constance could only imagine.

She’d not imagined this. A man washing ashore … Incredulous. Have you spoken to Ed about it?

Sam was there. He’ll have told him.

He should be told, Ian. A fishing boat or something might have gone down. There might be others out there who need saving. Shouldn’t you phone him?

Sam, he repeats, will do it. Or Tab will. Leave it.

Constance watches him. And as always, when she watches him, she thinks he is my children’s father. She thinks, too, he’s my husband and that amazes her – that she is old enough to be married or that she was ever bold enough. But her first thoughts are of the children, always, who are not so childlike these days. Will Jonny have the same wide neck, when he’s older? Will Leah’s skin also wrinkle by her mouth, in time? They take after their father, she knows that – in their looks, and quiet ways.

She sips. Ian?

He makes a sound – annoyed. He wants to read the paper.

What does he look like? This man?

What?

This man from Sye. What does he look like?

She waits. Constance waits for the answer, and the longer she waits, the more she thinks I know what he looks like. She can guess.

Dark, he says, casually.

Skinned?

No – dark-haired. His skin’s pale.

Not old, then?

Late thirties, maybe. Early forties. Hard to tell.

Beard?

He looks up. Constance. It is his warning voice.

She meets his stare. She holds her gaze until he looks away. Perhaps what surprises her is not that she was bold enough to marry, but bold enough to marry him – Ian, whose temper was as known as the Anne-Rosa is. And like the Anne-Rosa, it was mistrusted and whispered of and could rise out of the darkness, slick with hanging weed. She’d been told of it. But Constance was never afraid. Once, just once, in their early days of marriage they had argued about the farm – what had it been? A broken machine? A sheepdog that was not learning? She cannot recall it now and perhaps it does not matter. But Ian had struck the wall. He’d given a single roar and slammed his fist against it so that the wall shook. That had silenced them both – from loud voices to a sudden, incredible hush in which Constance could hear the dust settling onto the floor. Hands on her knees, she examined the plasterwork – broken, powdering. Then she pulled on her shoes and, without a word, she walked down the lane towards the harbour – meaning, absolutely, to catch the ferry and make her way back to the mainland, to the town she grew up in and still missed sometimes. Ian followed, pleading. I’m so sorry … Stay. It never happened twice. On that quayside, Constance turned to her husband and vowed – swore with gritted teeth and her hand to her chest – that she would leave him for good if he ever struck another thing. Anything, Ian – the wall, the dog, a pillow, her. I promise. Do you understand me? Yes, he understood her; Constance always keeps her word. And he has shouted since, and he’s slammed doors, and once, having argued with Nathan, he kicked the rainwater barrel with such power that it ruptured and the rush of water sent the chickens running in the way that chickens do – as if the world is ending. Ian can curse like no-one else she knows. And it is blunt, unimaginative swearing so that she winces. But that’s all he’s done, in twenty-four years. It is all he’ll ever do.

Constance drinks her orange juice.

There is the drip of the kitchen tap.

Someone needs to tell Emmeline, she says, and pads out of the room.

It is the peonies she loves. She has always been told that the island’s weather and its salt and thin soil would not suit them, that peonies could not grow on Parla. But she has grown them. She has tended them, and hoped, and here they are now. They grow in a cluster, facing south. Their pinkness makes her heart fill up, each time. When she walks back along the lane towards Easterly she sees them, and smiles – and it is like coming home to a person, she thinks. It is like being greeted. It is like a hello.

Emmeline kneels beside them. She holds a watering can and wears her sheepskin slippers. Beautiful, she tells them. You are doing very well.

It is one of the small benefits of living on her own: she can grow the flowers she has always longed to. Thirty years ago, any flowers she tried for were crushed by footballs and children’s feet; fifteen years ago, she would have looked out of the window on a Sunday as she cooked the roast dinner for Jack and wished that she could be out in the flowerbeds with a trowel and a bag of manure, rather than sieving the gravy. She called it a woman’s lot, back then. People matter more than flowers, of course. But now she has the time – at last. Foxgloves and hydrangeas. And she loves her peonies.

Emmeline stands, looks out to sea. The unending sea. She grew up in the lighthouse. Her, her parents and Tabitha had lived in one of the three houses at the lighthouse’s base, so that the sea was so close and so loud that it felt like a fifth person – a family member who was never far away. Her earliest memory is being shown the pots of paraffin whilst licking the butter off a currant bun; her second earliest is polishing the lens. And she had loved her lighthouse life. She’d loved winding the weights back up to the top of the stairs, and learning Morse code, and she had loved the view so much that she’d dreamed of keeping the light herself one day. Emmeline Bright – with her own jacket and hat. But lighthouse-keeping was never seen as woman’s work. When she married Jack Bundy at eighteen, she left the lantern behind her. She moved south and inland, into the farm called Wind Rising. From light and high seas to a dark-roomed house; from saltwater to sheep. Only half a mile from one life to the other, but those had been such different lives. And how many years had she walked through the creaking rooms of Wind Rising, with its missing roof tiles and open fire which threw smoke into the sitting room when the wind shifted itself? Long enough. Those years of smelling of sheep, of wedging paper under the uneven legs of chairs. All four children were born in that house, or near it. All of them were late to show their faces except Tom – of course. Tom leapt out early, as if too excited to wait.

She pushes fertiliser into the earth. Easterly – like all names on Parla, its name is forthright, brusque. It is simple – as if we are all fools and need to be told plainly. She, Jack and their youngest child moved here when it became free. A man called Strutt – a mainlander, sullen, bad teeth and bad manners – had died during those wild winter storms of nearly thirty years ago, and Emmeline had carried cardboard boxes of toys, books, bed linen, clothes and kitchen utensils over to Easterly in the following spring. Ian, as the eldest son, stayed at Wind Rising. He had been twenty-three that March. He took on the farm, with Nathan to help him – as boys were meant to, back then. They had no choice in it, really, for their father had started his heart trouble in the autumn before and could no longer farm. It had changed Jack – that shock, the air ambulance and the diet that was forced upon him left him a weaker man who could no longer haul sheep onto their rumps to shear them, or change tractor tyres. And Hester had already met George Moss. So Ian and Nathan became real farmers; and Emmeline, Jack and young Tom moved over the fields to this easterly place.

She counts on her fingers. Tom had been thirteen years old.

Those were my best years. Perhaps she should say that her best years were the first few of her marriage, or when all her children were young – but that’s not the truth. She loved the days when her eldest boys were farmers, men in their twenties who were strong and well-made and living their own lives, men who’d kiss their mother’s hair when they came in to see her but who went into her fridge without asking as if they were still small boys. She’d smiled, at that. Hester was in love – blooming with it. And Tom had spent his days running through fields or on beaches, coming back in the evenings with his pockets filled with shells or feathers or mussels for eating and with a head filled with stories. Mum, guess what I heard? She loved how he smelled. She loved how her youngest boy filled the house with his own sounds – his voice as he talked to the cat, his music, his bedsprings, the scuffing of his socked feet on the kitchen’s flagstone floor.

Those were Jack’s best years too, in some ways. He had nearly died, and survived it. A quietness came to him that he had never had before – gratitude, perhaps, or an awareness for the first time that he would be gone one day. He was a better husband, after his heart attack. He became the man she’d hoped for, all along. She remembers holding his hand in this garden, on a summer’s morning like this.

Her peonies nod in the breeze.

How does a person ever speak of their loss? How do they find the right words for it? Emmeline has never really been the talking kind.

She looks down at her hands. The hand cream has served no purpose. She has soil beneath her fingernails, again – brown crescent moons. Only a farmer or his wife would have hands like this, day in and day out. She had made her wedding vows with neat, square nails, and the following evening she’d glanced down at her hands – dirtied from the chicken shed, and from picking blackberries from the patch by the back door – and had thought this is how it will be, now. These are my married hands. She nearly lost her wedding ring, once, during the lambing season. A farmer’s wife’s hands, even now.

Briefly, there is resentment. It rises a little, like a far-out wave.

Emmeline looks up. A man is coming to her. He is a man, but he is also one of her sons, and so despite his age she still sees the child who had knocked his front milk teeth out when he fell on the quayside, the boy who believed, solemnly, that he’d heard sleigh bells on the roof one Christmas Eve. Nathan wears a white shirt. He walks with his hands in his pockets and when he sees her, he frees one hand and holds it up at her. He bends his fingers in a small, boyish wave.

Hello, she says. She hugs him by the peonies, and she can smell the sea in his hair. She does not hug for long, but when Emmeline goes to pull away from him she finds that Nathan is still holding her. He holds her very tightly, too tightly. She waits. She stays as she is, being held, and it is only when his arms start, at last, to soften, that she leans back from him and looks at his face – at the straight nose, the shining eyes – and she breathes, what is it? What’s wrong?

* * *

Nathan knew it had to be him who told her. Ian wouldn’t think of it. He’d call it unimportant or nothing to do with me. He probably slept well last night, snoring in Wind Rising as if nothing had changed, as if no man had been found at Sye.

Nathan has not slept at all. He knows it shows. Kitty said as much when she crept downstairs to find him still sitting in the armchair, an empty glass tilted in his lap. She’d said, you look like crap, Mr Bundy, smiling and stroking his knee.

As he’d walked along the lane to Easterly he’d tried out the different words in his head, whispered them under his breath, and he’d hoped that perhaps his mother would be out – that he’d find a note on the doormat saying gone to shop or elsewhere. But he’d looked up and seen her. She’d been tending to those pink flowers of hers, and he’d thought she looks old. The hunched back, the iron-grey hair.

When they’d hugged, Nathan had felt small again.

Now, they stand inside. She is looking at him, waiting. She licks her lips as she always does when she is nervous, and she says is it Kitty?

No.

Hester, then? Ian? The grandchildren?

No, Mum. Everyone’s fine.

You? Are you fine?

Been better …

Are you ill?

Mum … He’s forgotten the words. He tries to think of them but cannot so he puts his hands on top of her hands and says listen. Some stuff happened last night. At Sye.

Sye? She is frowning. The cove?

Sam Lovegrove was walking up there –

What happened? Did he fall, or …?

Sam’s OK, too. Mum, listen – he found a man. Washed up on the beach.

Emmeline is still.

Sam thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. He was lying on his front … Sam ran to the farm and got us – me, Ian, Jonny. We all went to Sye, and we carried him back. Took him to Aunt Tabitha’s.

Nathan pauses, breathes. He watches his mother’s face, and waits until her eyes show what he knows she will, shortly, be thinking. He waits. He waits. And then he sees her eyes change.

She says, Oh God …

Mum, it isn’t Tom.

How do you know? It might be.

He takes her wrists. No. It’s not. That’s what I’m here to tell you. It is not Tom.

Does he look like him?

Nathan winces. In part, I guess. Yes. But he is too tall. He is too tall, and he is wider than Tom ever was. The teeth are wrong, and –

It’s been four years. People change in four years. They grow.

Mum –

He’s at Tabitha’s? She breaks frees of him, hauls her jacket off the hook behind the door. I’ve got to go there.

Mum, he’s not Tom –

She shakes her head, she can’t hear him. She is fumbling in the pocket of her jacket, finds the car keys, and she trips out of the house into the sunlight and gets into the car.

Nathan calls, Mum! But he only calls it once. He is too tired to stop her, and knows she cannot be stopped. He stands on the grass and watches her go – over the potholes, past the log-pile. Once her car is gone he shuts his eyes.

The wind pushes at him. He can feel it, buffeting.

When he looks again he sees a plastic toy windmill on a stick, beside the fence. It turns, in the breeze. It is red, or it was – years of sun have faded it. He watches it turn. A northerly breeze.

What now? He knows.

Somebody else needs to be told – about this washed-up man.

* * *

The plastic windmill turns, and catches the light.

In the mending room at Lowfield, the stranger still sleeps. Tabitha watches his chest rise and fall.

In the harbour, a gull stands on a boat’s tarpaulin cover. It drinks from a pool of rainwater that has gathered there. To swallow, the gull lifts his beak to the sky, straightens its neck and gulps twice. Afterwards, it shakes its tail.

Sam sees this gull. He is at the top of the harbourmaster’s house – a double-fronted, red-bricked building that sits on the quayside. From his attic room, he can see everything – the harbour, the sea wall, the open water beyond it. He can see the mainland too – dipped and bluish, like a sleeper’s back. It is a good room. The eaves mean that Sam must stoop in places but he likes being here at the top of the house. His bedroom is untidy, boyish – a music system, a games console, a dartboard, crumbs on the carpet, mugs of cold tea, a row of free weights that he lifts in the evenings as he looks at the view. A single bed which is never made.

He sits on this bed now. He sits with his hands underneath him, looking out to sea. Sam did not sleep last night, or barely. When he closed his eyes he was there again – standing on the coastal path and looking down at Sye. He could see the man exactly. He can see him now.

Dark hair.

The fingers that tried to close around a stone.

Last night, Sam had thrown up by the sea wall. When he’d returned home, wiping his mouth, he’d found his father watching the news and whispered Dad? Something’s happened. He’d sounded young, afraid.

Things are passed on here. Houses, jobs, names – they are handed down to the next generation because that is the island’s way. This has always been a Lovegrove house. Sam’s great-great-grandfather had been the captain of the first Morning Star and he’d built this house himself with a clear sense of the Lovegroves yet to come. He’d captained the boat for fifty-six years. When he died, his son took over; then his son did. And a century later, the captain and harbourmaster of Parla is Edward Lovegrove, with his receding hairline and chapped hands, and last night this man had been watching the television with his feet on the coffee table. He’d lowered his feet when he saw Sam’s face.

What is it, son?

Ed is the law on Parla, if there is such a thing. Ed will know – a common phrase. It’s only based on his first aid certificates, his knowledge of the water and the radio in his study which he can talk to the coastguard on. It isn’t much, but it’s enough. A man’s come ashore.

What? Dead?

Alive.

Do we know him?

No. But for a moment, I …

Sam shifts now, stretches. He can feel the weight of a sleepless night on his shoulders. A night of hearing the curtains stir, of watching the hours tick across the neon face of his clock. In the last few minutes before daybreak, he’d been nearing sleep – drifting, growing heavier. But then the phone had rung. It had bubbled up the stairs, rousing him. His father had answered it. He’d said, hello Tabitha. Yes. Yes – Sam told me …

Everyone will know by now, Sam thinks. Or most of them, at least.

This is a fact that he is sure of: it is hard to have secrets here. Something happens and the island feels it. If a cat kills a bird in the morning, the feathers will have blown into each house by nightfall; if there is a quarrel on the quayside, the account of it will be unloaded with the rest of the boat, and carried inland. Guess what I saw … And taps will be turned off by women who think they have misheard their children or their friends, and say what? Really? Elbows will be taken hold of in the lanes. When he was a boy, there was a fire at the school one night and the red-edged curls of paper floated over the island, settled on the outboard motors, roofs and bonnets of cars – and Sam thinks news is like that. It gets everywhere. Never any secrets, never any surprises and he has wondered if that’s what has buckled Leah in the past – the lack of privacy, the way that all things are known.

Phones will be ringing. Hands will reach for other hands.

Emmeline … Will she rage? Grapple? Most likely.

And Sam thinks of Maggie. Who will tell her? And how will she be, when she’s told? He imagines her face. He sees the lines by her eyes, how she holds her fingers up to her mouth as she listens. How broken she can look.

Nearly four years.

He glances down at Sea Fairy. Her green tarpaulin is streaked with gull droppings. She bobs in the corner – old, unloved.

* * *

The sun is high and white. The grass is shining. Laundry is pegged on washing lines.

All the colours seem bright, as Nathan drives. He squints at the school’s roof, at the glossy tail of the rooster at Wind Rising, at the ragwort sprouting in the lane. Even the lighthouse’s paintwork seems brighter to him so that he reaches up for the car’s visor and tilts it down. Has there been a hotter day than this, this year? He doesn’t think so. He drives slowly, with his window down. His right forearm rests on the door and he can hear the long grass brushing the underside of his car. Once he’d have loved this weather. He’d have taken beers into the fields or left them in a rock-pool to cool, as he swam. Or he’d have taken a rug up to the lighthouse and the northern coast and spent the afternoon there – him, and Kitty.

A ewe treads in front of him.

One of mine. Nathan knows this. He knows his own, amongst Ian’s; they are Texel, firm-bodied with blue tags in their ears. They are trickier to shear in that they’re strong beasts, and two weeks ago he’d had to kneel hard on their ribs and tie their hind legs as he’d sheared them. Shearing … It’s in the Bundy blood. Ian, Hester and Nathan could all handle shears before they learnt to ride bikes or to add and subtract. They knew how to catch a sheep, drag it back and grip it tightly between their thighs before they knew how to spell Cantalay or Merme. Tom was the exception. He’d shear, but he’d have one eye on the water. Nathan grew strong from hauling sheep and mending fences; Tom’s arms thickened from lobstering, from pulling on the cord to start the outboard motor, from rowing into hidden coves.

Are you sure he’s one of ours? Their father said this, once. We’re land folk, not sea.

Nathan glances to his right.

Crest is coming into view. He sees its yellow guttering, its matching yellow door. This is the island’s highest point – the whole coastline can be seen from its driveway, from Litty in the south, round to Bundy Head. The house had been derelict, once. Once, it had been four stone walls with a leaking roof and the brown streaks of sheep urine on the skirting boards. But it was always the best position to live – the height, the views. Nathan remembers ducking through it as a child and feeling how a king in his castle must have felt – alive, amazed, buffeted by wind. Tom, also, felt that. When he was twenty-four he’d said, do you know what I’m going to do? For six summers he worked on that house. He’d hammered, hauled and rung friends on the mainland; he’d buy beers for his brothers before saying, you couldn’t help me with …? He made Crest a home again. And what a home – with bookshelves made of driftwood, curtains hung on lengths of rope, a septic tank, a compost heap, a chair forged out of wooden crates, a single solar panel as dark as a burnished eye. There was the chalky knot of whalebone Tom used to prop open the door. And the kitchen table had been part of a fishing boat, once; her name, Coralee, still hangs on the staircase. Nathan has seen it.

Tomato plants, too. Those were Maggie’s addition. The porch is south-facing and she’s filled it with them so that Nathan knows how the porch will smell today, when he enters it – the sharp fruit, the trapped heat.

He turns right, along its driveway.

Crest. He loves it and it saddens him – both.

He turns off the engine. There is a sudden hush, and he wonders what he will tell her, what words he will use and if they will be the right ones.

She appears. She steps out of an outbuilding, into the light. She holds a tin of yellow paint which is dripping down its side. Yellow paint on her arms and hands. Maggie looks up.

She smiles: hey.

Nathan shuts the car door. He comes so close that he can see she has yellow paint everywhere – on her cheeks, her nose, her collarbone. Her hair is tied back but one strand is loose and is blowing across her face so that it makes her blink, and the tip of it is yellow. There is the smell of sheep and fresh paint and Maggie’s washing powder and as a cloud’s shadow passes over them he thinks, briefly, how beautiful it is – to be standing here.

Nathan?

He doesn’t want to tell her. Just passing.

She eyes him. Liar, she says.

Maggie feels afraid. No-one is ever just passing – and not Nathan, of all people. Nathan, who tends to leave her be.

A strand of hair is fluttering, but she does not reach for it. Tell me.

A man’s been found. Washed up.

Washed up? From the sea?

He nods.

Alive?

Yes. He’s at Tabitha’s.

Is it –?

No. No, it’s not.

She tries to put the paint tin down, but it tilts, and spills, and he comes forward saying careful. I’ve got it. Here – give it to me.

* * *

Nathan leads her inside. He knows her house, and he knows to duck slightly as he steps into the kitchen, under the doorframe and the hanging copper pans. She walks with her hands held in front of her, as if walking in the dark.

Sit down.

It’s not Tom?

No.

Maggie hears the small hesitation, looks up.

For one small moment, I … Nathan shrugs. He looks a bit like him.

Dark?

Yes. And the beard. And he’s big – tall, broad …

But not Tom?

Not Tom.

You’re sure? Her eyes are round. They are like the stones that come ashore, the stones that have been rolled and rolled through the years, thrown against other stones. They are grey, with a navy edge.

Mags, I promise. This man is not him.

They sit side by side, at the table that used to be Coralee. Maggie runs her fingers over her lips. Who is he, then?

We don’t know yet. He’s still sleeping.

Where was he found?

Sye. He was lying on the stones. Sam found him. He came to Wind Rising for help and we carried him.

To –?

Lowfield.

She considers this. She takes a deep breath, releases it slowly. OK. Well … Tom never liked it – Sye. Said it was dank, hard to walk on. If he was going to wash up, he wouldn’t wash up there.

It is a half-joke; they are nervous words.

Is he hurt?

No. Doesn’t seem it.

Does Emmeline know?

Yes.

He watches Maggie. She says nothing for a while. There is a single crumb on the table, and Nathan watches her as she places her forefinger on it, rolls the crumb from side to side. Left and right. You came here because you knew people would talk. It is not a question.

You know how it is here.

She says yes I know.

He cannot think of anything to say. There is nothing to say to her that he has not said before, or tried to say, and so he sits, scans the room that they are sitting in – the spotted oven gloves, the chopping board with an apple core on it, the ferry times on the noticeboard. There are shells everywhere – cockles, whelks, a purple-tipped sea urchin on the windowsill. Beside it there is a vase of feathers with sand still on them, feathers whose blades have torn or split. Maggie the forager. She is always looking – but aren’t they all? His eyes settle on a photograph. It is held to the fridge with magnets and it is of Nathan’s younger brother and Maggie; they are wearing anoraks, with their faces pressed together, cheek to cheek. Tom’s arm is in the foreground, leading to the camera – he was taking the photo himself. A bright, blustery day.

Where was that taken?

She follows his gaze. Bundy Head. Then she lifts her finger off the table, brushes the crumb away with the thumb of the same hand – a short, rough sound. Nathan, are you still hopeful?

Maggie is like no-one else. Tom had said so, too. Nathan remembers the moment when Tom stepped down from the Morning Star six years ago, walked up to his brother and said, I’ve found her. Just three words, but Nathan knew what he’d meant. He himself had found Kitty not too long before, or she had found him, and he and Tom had gone back to Wind Rising that night and opened the rum, toasted these women who weren’t like the rest. Tom described Maggie to him – a wary, slender, blonde-haired woman collecting pint glasses outside The Bounty Inn, a tea-towel stuck through her apron which was longer than her black skirt.

Hopeful? He thinks the years … The years which have been split into months and the months which have been split into weeks and the weeks into days and the days into hours and hours have been split into a breath in and a breath out, and Tom has been missing from all of them. Hope becomes tired. It fades, regardless of how much you wish it not to.

That he’s still alive somewhere? Didn’t drown?

I imagine it, Nathan says. Sometimes.

She nods. Yes. I imagine it. I still imagine him walking up the drive. But is that the same as being hopeful? I don’t think so.

This man isn’t Tom.

I know.

No, she’s like no-one else. She’s smart, and hard, and vulnerable, and she still uses Tom’s boat, still lifts and lowers his lobster pots when most other widows would have left the island entirely perhaps or at least left the sea well alone. She wears his oilskins even though they’re too big. Only once has Nathan seen her cry. Can I do anything? He knows there is nothing that anyone can do.

And for a moment Maggie is silent. She looks at the table as if she has not heard him, as if there is something on the table that Nathan cannot see. Then she flinches, turns to him. Help me with the doorframe? I’ve got more paint on myself than … She turns her wrists over, showing him. A small, sad smile.

She was Tom’s. He will always help her if he can.

* * *

The red car skids on gravel. Its door is thrown open. Emmeline appears, hurries to the front door of Lowfield and she bangs – twice, bang-bang – on its glass. Tabitha!

She waits, briefly. Bangs again.

Her sister’s face appears behind the glass and then the door opens. She glares, her forefinger raised to her lips. Hush! He’s sleeping!

So it’s true? There’s a man?

Keep your voice down.

Is there?

She nods. Ian told you?

Nathan. Weren’t you going to?

Tabitha flinches. Don’t be snapping at me, Emmeline.

They study each other, shifting their jaws.

I suppose you’d better come in.

Tabitha leads her sister into the kitchen, shuts the door. She sees her cereal bowl in the sink, waiting to be washed; a used tea bag sits on the draining board with the teaspoon still attached to it. The floor needs mopping – Tabitha can hear the soles of her slippers sticking to it as she walks and she hopes Emmeline can’t hear that. She notices these things, when Emmeline’s here.

He came ashore at Sye. Sam found him.

I heard that.

He went to Wind Rising, got your boys. Jonny, too.

Is it Tom?

The nurse expected this – but not so soon, or so bluntly. No, it’s not. Did Nathan say he was?

He said he looks like him.

He does – a little. Same colouring.

So it could be. And he came out of the water, so –

I know he did. And yes, he has dark hair, and a beard, and there’s a likeness of sorts. But Em, it’s not him. Do you hear?

How do you know?

Because there are differences! Big ones! He’s too tall to be Tom. Too broad. The nose isn’t right and the teeth aren’t the same, and those aren’t his hands, and …

Teeth change! He could have changed them. He could have grown …

Em …

I want to see him. A statement, of course.

He’s sleeping. No.

I won’t leave till I see him.

That stubborn streak. Tabitha narrows her eyes, thinks that’s Emmeline. The petulant child who grew into a fierce, resolute grown-up who rarely laughs or takes no for an answer. But then, so much has happened. And Emmeline’s had to be tough, she supposes: Jack as a husband, that farm and four children. Four to begin with.

The grandfather clock ticks.

Fine, Tabitha says. You can see him. But – she holds up a finger – no waking him, Em – whoever he is, he needs to rest. And she leads her sister down the hallway to a door with frosted glass.

* * *

He sleeps, this sea creature. This man from the waves. This tired Poseidon.

Firstly, Emmeline sees his size. He is as broad as a boat, and as long as one. Then she sees the long lashes, the tiny lines by his eyes. His nose is perfectly straight. The beard is black – not a deep brown with a reddish hue, and with no grey flecked in it: it is as black as night is. His eyebrows are of the same blackness. The tip of his left ear is creased. The backs of his hands are veined and sore-looking – huge, capable hands.

Has he spoken?

Not much.

The man breathes like the sea.

Emmeline is in the mending room for a minute, no longer. It is enough.

She walks out into the sunlight. She cannot name it, or describe it – what she is feeling now. Disappointment is not enough of a word – not nearly. She had known, deep down, it wasn’t him. In her heart she’d known that he could not be Tom – it can’t be, it can’t be, not after so long – but she had hoped, all the same; she had snatched at the faintest of chances because she is his mother, and she must, and so she had stumbled and demanded and banged on her sister’s door and now Emmeline feels unsteady, foolish. Unspeakably sad.

Tom had a scar on his nose from a childhood fall; his lips were thinner, equal-sized. She’d know her boy in the dark, even now. She’d know him in a crowded room or by smell alone or handwriting.

Tabitha comes by her. I’m sorry.

Oh, I’m sure you are.

Emmeline leaves, and as she goes she feels, too, the swell of anger – as if someone, somewhere, is laughing. As if a trick has been played.

* * *

Who else? Who else cannot know what to think or say? They are all like fish on land now – blank-eyed, open-mouthed.

What a day … Ed Lovegrove stands with his hands in his pockets; he looks out to sea. Boy oh boy, what a day … Eighteen years as a harbourmaster, thirty-nine years as a harbourmaster’s son before that, and Edward can’t remember a man being washed ashore like this. Bodies, yes. He’s had his deaths to deal with – Jack’s, a birdspotter’s, that man from Utta who caught his foot in the line as he was throwing out pots so that they found his boat going round and round and when they hauled in the line he was already half-plucked at by fish. Ed fears the watery deaths. It is the watery deaths that he feels he can prevent by watching the weather, noting down each boat that docks here, keeping an eye on the weather station that lives at the back of his house. He has a rain gauge; there is a small anemometer to measure wind speed and wind direction. He tends to it, like a man at prayer.

But a person who has appeared? That the sea has given?

Tabitha rang earlier. She’d given the details – the beard, the injured hands – and Ed had not known the words or the way forwards. He’d said it isn’t a death, is it? So …? A man washed ashore is the stuff of books; it is not what happens in the twenty-first century to an island that relies on tourism and migrant birds and the sinking price of lamb. An island with a coloured line of jetsam – plastics, netting, nylon rope – on every beach like a scar.

We wait until he wakes. We do nothing till he’s woken.

I should call the coastguard in case …

OK, said Tabitha. But not the police. Not yet.

Fine. Not yet, Ed agreed. The police, he knows, would bring trouble of their own.

So Ed had settled in the office of the harbourmaster’s house and made the call. Mac had answered. He was eating something. With a half-full mouth he’d said, really? Jesus. Need an air ambulance?

Tab says not. Any boats down?

There had been the distant click of computer keys, and when the clicking stopped he’d heard Mac swallow, clear his throat. Nope, no boats, Ed. Well, there was a dinghy capsized about twenty miles north of you, but both men were picked up. He’s not one of yours? A guest, or some such?

I’m sure he is. Just checking, you know.

Or some half-fish creature? A part-whale? Haven’t you guys got a tale about that sort of thing? A hard, single laugh.

Mac – who Ed has never warmed to. Thanks, he’d said, hung up.

* * *

The day fades. The sky pinkens.

It is low tide. The beaches are glassy. The wading birds are reflected in the sand and sometimes they make their short, skimming flight to a different stretch of sand and land with their legs stretched out.

Curlews. Nathan hears them.

He turns off the engine but he sits, for a while. He stares at the steering wheel. Nathan has no thoughts at this moment: he is empty, worn-out.

Kitty watches him. She wears a floral apron, and as she’d been picking bits of eggshell out of a bowl of yolks she’d heard his car, looked up.

Her husband is staring at something – the dashboard?

Then he climbs out. The car door shuts and there is the crunch of the gravel, and from an upstairs bed the cat jumps down with a muffled thud as Nathan comes into the hallway, kicks off his boots.

She wipes her hands, goes to him. He tastes of salt. So?

They sit at the kitchen table, facing each other. His wife has a sweep of navy-blue powder on her eyelids, and Nathan sees that some of this powder is also on her cheekbones as if it has dusted down through the course of the day. She smells as she always does – lotion, Miss Dior, a touch of turpentine. Kitty Bundy. At first, she’d called it a dancing name.

Mum went straight to Lowfield. I told her it wasn’t Tom but she still went.

Of course she did – softly said.

Seven years of marriage but the word wife can still feel new to him. This woman – rich-haired, curved, slow in her movements – leans forwards, over her glass. She looks down into it, holds it by the stem and swirls the wine very carefully. Her hair comes down as she does this. She has not aged – not even slightly. She looks as she did when he first met her, when she turned around in a scarlet dress.

And Maggie? Did you go to see her?

I did. He sighs, rubs his eyes.

How did she take it?

It’s been a long day, Kit – which is his way of asking for silence, now.

She leans back. She takes her hair and gathers it, holding it on the top of her head with both hands, and for a moment Nathan can see her white neck, the tiny tattoo of a bird at the nape. Well. Mine was long too. I’ve worked all day – ten hours of it. Do you want to hear about it? She waits.

Nathan says nothing.

Kitty lets go of her hair, pushes her chair back. The bird on her neck goes away.

Maggie was calm – Kitty is certain of this. Maggie, who is too neat and reserved and dignified to wail in company, or throw things at the wall. Small-boned and gentle. And she is contained, in the way cupped water is – full of reflections and moments but they pass too quickly for Kitty to read them clearly. As Kitty rinses the plates of omelette, she can see Maggie perfectly – how she’d waded out from Lock-and-Key beach on the night that Tom died. Her pink shirt had darkened as the water reached her waist, and she’d called out Tom? Tom?

Vulnerable, and lonely. Kind. Old-souled.

And she is on her own, of course. No family in the world. Having Sam Lovegrove watching your house at night is not proper company. They all try to see more of her, but she hides herself away.

It is not how Kitty would grieve. She, if she had to, would grieve wildly – with noise, mucus, paint on the canvas, blustery walks on beaches, curse words and exhausted sleep. But everyone grieves differently just as everyone loves in different ways. Emmeline is resentful; Nathan has retreated or almost, and he still drinks on his own at night. The crate that she leaves in the lane for recycling is always clinking, and full.

Their cat – tabby, overweight – butts her head against her shins.

Kitty leans down to stroke her, and as she does this she wonders how you can grieve a death if you have no bones, if you have nothing to bury or go back to. Poor Maggie. Poor thing.

When she turns to speak to her husband again, she finds his chair is empty. He’s gone away soundlessly, so that Kitty drops the tea-towel onto the worktop and stares where he had been.

* * *

And so the bedside lights go on, one by one.

The television’s bluish glow flits in island sitting rooms. Curtains are pulled into the middle, and closed. In a bedroom of Wind Rising, a girl with bitten fingernails holds her mobile phone. She sits cross-legged on her bed, and types sounds like a hard day. Hope you are OK. Does she put one x, after this, or several? Leah chooses one, and presses send. The words fly. Sending. Then, Sent.

Beneath the lighthouse, in the old lighthouse-keepers’ quarters, Rona Lovegrove bends down. She peers through the glass door of her oven, watches her sponge cake rise. She has heard this man looks like Tom. She thinks of the Bundys, and thinks of love.

Jim Coyle lies in bed. He lies in his own darkness. He tries to imagine the lighthouse’s slow flash. Jim – like the Brights – was born in the lighthouse-keepers’ quarters; unlike the Brights, he became the lighthouse-keeper himself, in time – and he misses so much about it. The drowsy tick of cogs in the lantern room. The sweet smell of paraffin. Sticky, blackish knuckles from polishing the brass.

He is blind now. But Jim still knows each crack in the plaster, each decorative curl on the wrought-iron fireplace where he used to toast crumpets, each speckle of paint that made it onto windowpanes. There was a loose brick in the boiler room which he kept his penny whistle behind. Is it still there? Might it still play the same tune, if he blew?

Beside him, his wife reads. He can hear the pages as she turns them, how their bottom edges catch the bedspread to make a dragging sound. He asks what book is it?

He asks, but Jim knows. The book has a leather smell. He’d heard its spine crack as she’d opened it.

Abigail says Folklore and Myth. You know the one.

Yes he does. And as soon as Jim had heard that a man – bearded, very handsome – had been washed up at the cove called Sye, he’d known that this was the book that his wife would turn to. She’d take it from its shelf, and find its fourteenth page. She’d smooth that page with her palm.

Dearest, she says – do you know what this reminds me of?

Abigail of the stories. Abigail who is eighty-three years old and yet whose love of this one book is absolute, childlike.

The Fishman. Your Fishman. The one you saw off Sye.

And there it is – the word he knew was coming. Like so many other words, it is uttered and the breeze catches it and it is carried out of the Old Fish Store over the island. It blows against the rusting cars at High Haven; it scuds on the beaches with the night-time spume. It has been down on the sea bed, perhaps; for years, it has been half-forgotten, tapped at by passing claws. But Abigail has hauled up Fishman now. The word surfaces – beautiful, glass-bright.

* * *

This word will make its way to all of us, in time. It will knock against our doors and we will all be saying it. Even I will talk of the Fishman – but not yet.

Night. People turn to sleep. They close the back door, or rub cream on their feet. They finish their chapters or lie in deep baths with tea lights next to the taps and think about the day’s events. In the cottage by the school a couple are making love. The brown dog at the foot of their bed yawns with a whine, flaps his ears, and they break away from their kissing and smile at the sound in the dark.

One by one, eyes close.

But also, two eyes open. In a room that smells of lavender, two black eyes open, blink twice. Three times.

He lies very still, listening.

After a while, he lifts the blankets, looks down at his long, white legs.

As for Maggie, she climbs out of the bath. She wraps a towel about her. Four years have passed, or nearly four. Who told her the grief would lessen? Grief does not lessen; it changes, and perhaps she has changed so that she can endure it better. But the grief does not grow less.

She misses him beyond words. She will never have the words for how much she misses him.