The Silver Dark Sea. Susan Fletcher
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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.
The Seals with Human Hearts
Of all the sea creatures – whales, turtles, lobsters with their intricate, grooved tails that can slide into themselves like a fan, the jellyfish, the squid, the octopus that I reckon knows far more than I can ever know – it is the seal I love the most. I always have. And it’s hard to be sure if I love the seals for the stories I have heard of them or for their expressions – quizzical, trusting. Both maybe. Both is most likely.
The first seal I ever saw was near Tap Hole. It was winter or late autumn, at least, for I wore woollen gloves with a matching hat. I had the hat pulled down very low. It covered my ears and brushed my eyelashes.
The seal looked human at first. I thought someone was swimming. But then I stood on the edge, squinted and thought I know what that is … Its head was glossy, its eyes were round. Its body was freckled, slick.
Sea-hounds, Emmeline called them. For how they barked at night.
Or they are the souls of the drowned men … So Nathan said. He knew his stories and told them, from time to time.
Me? I liked Abigail’s version most of all. In her well-worn armchair and with her Earl Grey tea she unfolded her book called Folklore and Myth and said, in the beginning, when the world was made, the seals were given human hearts … I asked why – and she’d looked up, surprised. I don’t know why! It doesn’t matter why … What matters is that it says so. She tapped the page – see? I like this because it is fitting; it seems a tale that’s right. For seals are drawn to human voices,