by Julie Mayhew
All three of the Eldest Girls had come of age, Jade-Marie being the last to turn sixteen in the middle of the holidays, and there had been a perceptible filling out of their bodies, new angles forming from the sharpening of their features. The boys who were old enough appraised these changes with furtive curiosity, as if peering through the glass of an oven door to judge the rising of a cake.
But none of this was done in chapel. The boys would have seen the girls in July and August, lying on their towels on the small beach offered up by the harbour at low tide, as exposed as they’d ever be, in rolled-up denim and coloured vests. They’d have watched the girls devour the summer’s delivery of magazines from the mainland, sliding sunglasses down their noses to examine the few passing strangers, searching them for hints of what life was like in that distant outside world.
Three visitors came that summer: one couple (middle-aged walkers in audible, wet-wicking fabrics) and a solo traveller from the telephone company, trying yet again to convince the islanders of the benefit of installing a mast. The widow Esther Deezer put them up in her spare rooms, serving breakfasts and dinners sparse enough to encourage them never to come back, driving home the message that isolation was neither a tourist attraction nor a problem to be solved. The question of the mast was put to the men of the Council once again in July and as in previous years received a unanimous no.
Until Jade-Marie sang too loudly in chapel, the girls were a mere novelty, known by their collective moniker ‘the Eldest Girls’ – and long before their time. The font of St Rita’s had sat dry and unused for four years now and there had been a similarly disconcerting absence of new babies on Lark between 1998 and 2000. This meant that the three girls, all born in 2001, became the most senior pupils at the end of Year Eleven. Or the ‘Fifth Form’ in old money, the kind of currency the school of St Rita’s understood.
There was Britta Sayers, the true islander, a ‘pure catch’, distinguished by her long ropes of lucky black hair. There was Jade-Marie Ahearn, with her wild brown mane, a legacy of her missionary father, Neil, who’d arrived on Lark in the 1990s, departing it in the Great Drowning of 2002 while Jade was still a babe in her Larkian mother Mary’s arms. Then there was Anna Duchamp, who would be forever marked out as a coycrock – an incomer – by her exotic blonde bob, scissored neatly to curl beneath the ears. Anna arrived on the island at the impressionable age of four, with her French father, her Scandinavian mother and her little brother, Julian.
And now there was another coycrock girl on Lark, arrived on the recent June ship. She too was born in 2001 and with her particular shade of hair, which was considered a bad omen by those who heeded the old ways, she might create a ‘full set’ with Britta, Anna and Jade-Marie. Black, blonde, brown, red. If three became four the inauspiciousness of the girl’s coppery hair might be reversed. That’s what was said; or rather what was not said.
Superstition singled out four as a powerful number – stable, real, encompassing north, south, east and west. A union would make the girls a formidable combination of earth, fire, air and water as they took their seats at the long desk in the north-facing classroom. Mr Crane taught the Sixth Form, alongside his running of the school. Those girls could become their own talisman.
But the small, pale coycrock with the red hair was not present at that first morning worship. She had not turned up for the first day of term.
During the second verse of that morning’s hymn, the point in the song when the dancing spreads to the fishermen, Jade-Marie raised her voice to match the registers of the younger children. By the third verse, when the dancer in all unreasonableness is strung up after curing the lame, Jade-Marie was no longer singing but bellowing the words, engulfing the operatic harmonies of Mr Crane’s wife, Diana.
Britta and Anna, standing either side of Jade, lowered their hymn books, held only for appearance’s sake as they knew the words off by heart, and they stared. It was Britta who laughed, just a small cough of embarrassment, though she soon turned serious and ashen like Anna. An understanding began to throb between the three girls as the fourth verse arrived, as Jade-Marie’s voice grew yet wilder with pain:
I danced on a Friday
When the world turned black –
It’s hard to dance
With the devil on your back.
A tear spilled down Anna’s cheek. Britta’s chest rose and fell in hitching gasps.
This was when Miss Cedars, the nice, polite teacher of the GCSE pupils, leapt from her pew and, with uncommon ferocity, yanked Jade-Marie from her place, the girl’s hymn book hitting the stone floor with a slap. Teacher and pupil then wrestled their way down the aisle, Jade-Marie screaming the last lines of the fourth verse, as if issuing a final threat:
They buried my body
And they thought I’d gone,
But I am the Dance
And I still go on.
Then she was pushed out into daylight beyond the ironwork door.
Mrs Stanney at the organ continued to play at her usual sprightly pace, but the infant classes, who had never seen such behaviour in their entire lives, fell silent, their mouths forming little Os. Mr Crane slammed the spine of his hymn book against the lectern, issuing a clipped instruction to ‘Sing!’ The infants leapt in unison, then shrank small, searching for the words for verse five – words that would soon, like so many hymns and prayers and quotations, become second nature to them.
One of the boys who walked close to Britta and Anna along the cliffside path back to school after worship, said that the girls had discussed, in whispers, not returning to their classroom. They would fall behind the last teacher, slip into the graveyard, make a hiding place of one of the tilting tombs, then skirt the edge of the nunnery to make their escape across estate land… but this plan was discarded as hastily as it was put together.
They had to go back. They had to be there for their friend. She was in the headmaster’s office, with Miss Cedars her jailer. Mr Crane would return, Miss Cedars would be asked to leave, and then what?
And then what?
THE BOOK OF LEAH
In the beginning, I considered peroxide.
The woman and her daughter who arrived on the June ship were my inspiration, the shock they sent through the congregation when they stood to receive the host for the first time. No one said anything aloud, of course. People would pat my head for luck in the Provisions Store and mutter blessings in my ear (a ‘pure catch’ they called me, even though there was a distinct lack of fishermen to be doing the netting), but voicing this kind of lore in chapel, admitting that you believed in a set of mysteries and superstitions beyond the bible – that was a step too far. Still, I knew their thoughts – this woman and her daughter were inviting catastrophe upon us with their flaming locks.
What a thrill.
I began to wonder if I, simply by altering the colour of my hair, could also bring about a change. If I went from black to white-blonde, transformed into my negative image, who would I be then? Would I also welcome in catastrophe?
Would catastrophe be preferable to nothing at all?
But let the record show, it was not Ben’s arrival that caused Miss Cedars to disappear.
I had grown tired of playing her – because that is how it had come to feel, like a role upon the stage. Miss Cedars, the sweet, keen teacher of the senior years, the spinster nearing her ancient thirties, the one who had taken tenancy of the centre harbour cottage when everyone knew it was reserved for a young, married couple, people who could be trusted to go forth and multiply, earning themselves a property on the south elevation with extra bedrooms.
The loss of my first name had come to upset me. It had been deftly cut away as soon as I began teaching.
‘No one will call you “Leah” anymore,’ Ruth French had cautioned me. ‘Not even the adults. It’ll be, Morning, Miss Cedars, and, Will we get a break in the clouds, d’ya think, Miss Cedars?’
She had been three years above me at school, and was three years ahead of
me in her teaching training. I assumed she was taking the opportunity to be superior – you never really leave the playground, after all – but she was right. I became Miss Cedars. Only Miss Cedars.
‘Ah, you thought the likes of us would be exempt?’ she said with a wink.
Ruth was a blackhead too, and while not a daughter of the Council, her colouring gave her some status. She was never bothered with ear-blessings and head-patting, though. She shared a house on the lower, less desirable stretch of the south elevation with Catherine ‘Cat’ Walton, the assistant curate with the spiky hair. Ruth wasn’t a ‘pure catch’ like me. During her appraisals in Mr Crane’s office, I wondered if he made her read the passage from Leviticus that warned of abomination.
I had become desperate for a shift in the way I was seen, to be known as Leah once more. Not compliant Leah from the good book, the one who raises children as a consolation when her husband takes her better-loved sister as another wife. Not that Leah. Not Leah the dope. I would be Leah with the tender eyes who goes to bed with Laban and deceives him into marrying her in the first place, convincing him in the dark, with her naked body, that she is as desirable as her too-perfect sister, Rachel.
True to form, I lost my nerve. I waited in line upstairs at the Counting House to use one of the computers (the school internet being strictly off limits for ordering goods from the mainland) and hovered the mouse over the ‘buy’ button beside a bottle of peroxide. Then I clicked away and bought myself a skirt instead. It was blue, with pleats and a mermaid shine. A daring choice, or perhaps a cowardly one.
Ben was merely a catalyst. Let’s say that. He was a channel.
The Autumn term was rolling close – my favourite time of the year. Clean stationery, a fresh set of faces staring back from the front row of desks. In the replenishing sun of July and August, lying back on the harbour beach, I would reread the set texts – Lord of the Flies, Gulliver’s Travels, The Tempest – stories we hoped might connect with the pupils. Then I would arrange an informal meeting about the year ahead over a glass of shandy at the Anchor. (A ‘wam-bam’ was what cute Miss Cedars called it.) Ruth French would be there to represent the juniors, her demeanour softened by two months of warm winds. Dellie Leven, the senior assistant, would bring a tin of something sweet from her stockpile of summer baking. My enthusiasm would spill across the table, enough for the three of us.
‘We should hold some classes on the lawn overlooking the East Bay. It would really bring the subject alive!’
Every year I’d say it, always able to forget that the balminess and the clear skies were transient guests, small birds that would soon fly back to their real home. The fog crept up on you. Perhaps it is a measure of the human capacity for hope, or for self-deception, that I was able to believe the weather might, for once, that year, be different. By mid-September you could lose sight of your own feet on the coastal paths, and when the rains came, they did not mess around: they swung in hard. The idea of holding any kind of lesson outside was ridiculous. And that year I did not suggest it. I called no wam-bam. My copy of Lord of the Flies lay on the floorboards of my bedroom by my slippers, unread, its pages curling in the damp, gathering a musty smell like everything did if kept for more than a few days away from daylight. The island was a sponge, the sea seeping into the corners of every house.
I took my malaise to Margaritte next door; how could I ever have explained this strange wave of melancholy to Dr Bishy? Tuesdays were my evenings with Margaritte. I drew the curtains while she lit a stick of incense with shaking hands, the glow of the match revealing the thinness of her long white hair. We’d settle down opposite one another at the green-baize-topped table, as if we were going to do something as innocuous as play a hand of poker. We’d have a glass or two of Margaritte’s home-brewed wine, swap the news that so often fell through the gaps between our generations, and then, almost as an afterthought, she would read my palm and deal out my future.
She knew what troubled me. Everyone was going. Everyone had gone. All four of my childhood friends and then, that year, my little brother, Paul. He didn’t even wait for the return leg of the August ship, the last ship of the year, the one you were supposed to take for long-time leaving if you didn’t want to tempt fate. So desperate was he for the possibilities of the mainland, that he took the first ship in April, the day after his twenty-first birthday. Mum and Dad, inexplicably, said nothing to make him stay.
This was the root cause of Miss Cedars’ disappearance, of her slow evaporation. My elders had always told me that wanderlust was nothing but an unhealthy quirk of the genes – like original sin, it could be beaten back and conquered – but Paul was strong enough for the fight. He left, and my faith went with him. The colour of all my memories faded. Those days lost trekking across estate land for the best horse-chestnut trees, pockets full of shining conkers. See a black bird and you can’t speak again until you see a white one. Forfeit is to throw three conkers at the high, mullioned windows of the Big House and risk waking up the Earl. Pink sunsets on the cobbles for the June cook-out. The lick-slap of the sea against the harbour wall. The smell of mackerel on the fire. Weeks spent in collusion on our effigy of St Jade, her construction never withstanding the door-to-door singing. One year her nose falls off; another, her arm. The next, more appropriately, her foot. Laughing until we couldn’t breathe.
Miss Cedars was renowned on Lark for preaching the word of the island to anyone who even mooted the idea of leaving. She kept on preaching right up until they walked the gangplank.
‘It’s all right for you,’ my friends would reply gnomically, and I thought I understood them. I was different – I had my teaching post, I enjoyed privileges as the daughter of the gamekeeper, I was more at one with the land than them, but still I fought back.
‘You won’t find a place on earth as beautiful or as special as here.’ My passion was hard to articulate; something always stoppered my throat. ‘Lark is not the problem,’ I told them, ‘because we are Lark. We are its future. We are its blood.’ I believed that.
Yet, when Paul said he was going, my mouth ran dry. He knew how wonderful the place was; he had lived it all alongside me.
‘Maybe you should come too,’ he said, and what on earth was I supposed to reply to that?
Margaritte turned over the card that signified my immediate future. The Knight of Cups. In the low, campfire voice she affected when doing her readings (not at all the voice she used when offering more wine), she told me, ‘And here comes your love.’
I turned away, else I might cry.
Margaritte’s shelves beside me were filled with books that she believed contained the true voice of the island, untainted by the prophets and evangelists who had washed up on our shores over the years. Titles such as Past Lives: The Basics, Cosmic Ordering: A Higher Level, The Truth Within the Runes – so much contraband in plain sight. She had created a circle of invisibility around her books and objects, she said. No one could see them unless she allowed it.
‘You really believe that?’ I’d scoffed.
‘Do you believe that a man turned water into wine?’ she replied. ‘That he spat in the eyes of the blind to cure them? That he could walk on the surface of the sea?’
I paused. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, which was a startling admission.
‘I do,’ Margaritte replied. ‘I know it’s possible.’
In the light of day, I believed that the creases on my palm signified nothing more than the way I clenched my fist. The outcome of the cards was as arbitrary as the roll of a dice. I was convinced by the messages only in the moment they were delivered, fleetingly. Once the reading was over, after Margaritte had knocked on the deck to rid it of me, walked three times round the room anti-clockwise and opened up the curtains, I returned to the idea that it was all silly, childish, harmless.
But, the Knight of Cups …
‘Ha!’ I managed in response to her prediction. I tried for lightness. ‘Well, if the sky falls in!’
Marga
ritte tapped out a thoughtful rhythm on the shoulder of the Knight’s horse with a crooked finger, her nail thick and painted. I didn’t want to look at him, that warrior in his winged helmet, golden chalice in hand. He was false hope.
‘What are you saying – that I’m about to fall in love with Saul Cooper?’ I gave a short laugh. ‘Because he’s the only one left and he’s old! Almost forty!’
Margaritte did not smile.
‘He’s come to us reversed,’ she said, nodding sagely. This card was upside-down beside the others. ‘He’s a charming fraud sometimes, our Knight of Cups. A man who can’t separate truth from the lies he tells himself.’
I waited for more.
She shook her head, shook away her doubt. ‘But he’s between two cards of good fortune so my instinct is to trust him.’ At last, she smiled. ‘Let’s see who the August ship brings in, shall we?’
So, I became optimistic, buoyant, despite all efforts not to be. I thought idly of making a visit to the Customs House. Not to ask Saul Cooper for his hand in marriage – the mere idea of him, those small, ferrety features, his particular aroma of fishermen’s mints and unwashed armpits – but I would go to him and request a look at August’s incoming passenger list.
Again, my nerve deserted me. Or rather, rationality won out. Saul would take huge delight in my enquiry. He’d wear that thin-lipped smirk, the one that suggested he had material on you, pictures, things he would share on men’s nights at the Anchor without hesitation – because it was said that he was the keeper of a stash of magazines, the odd VHS from the mainland, things that men liked to look at, boys, those who were willing to risk God’s wrath.
