Seaward

by Susan Cooper

  FOR HUME

  —S. C.

  CHAPTER 1

  Westerly came down the path at a long lope, sliding over the short moorland grass. His pack thumped against his back with each stride. A lark flicked suddenly into the air a yard away from him; flew low for a few feet; dropped; flew again.

  “Go home,” he said. “It’s not you they want.”

  He strode on without pausing, without turning to see the bird wheel and dart her watchful way back to the nest. He had promised himself not to look behind him—not more than once every mile. He had turned too often in the last few days, expecting always to see the figures prickling the horizon, far-off but implacable, following. But each time the hills had been empty.

  Beyond the hollow in the moors that he was crossing now, the land rose again in a long bony sweep, purple and green, dappled by cloud shadow. But trees clustered in the hollow, and faintly he could hear water splashing. He was thirsty, and hungry too; he had been walking since first light, and the sun was hot now, halfway up the sky. He came to a fork in the faintly-marked path, the way trodden no longer by men but written on the land by the memory of them, and he turned downhill to the sound of the running stream.

  It ran fast, wider than he had expected, eddying bright round glistening grey stones. Westerly curled himself awkwardly round a young alder clump and lay flat, splashing his hot face, drinking until he gasped. Water ran down his chest as he sat up, making tiny runic letters out of the tentative dark hair that was beginning to thicken there, and his wet shirt came clammy-cold against his skin.

  For a while he prowled the banks of the stream, pausing wherever a rock turned the quick water aside into a pool. Each time he lay flat beside the pool, motionless, staring down; then patiently rose again, shouldered his creased leather pack and moved onto the next. By the time he had found what he was looking for, his shirt was long dry and the sun was high overhead, hot on his back.

  He went back through the trees to stare out over the hazy purple moorland, but in all the rolling miles nothing moved.

  Westerly lay down again on the bank of the stream, his chin propped on a big overhanging rock, and carefully lowered his right hand into a pool fringed with green weed. His fingers moved, unceasingly but almost imperceptibly, rippling as the weed rippled. Very soon in the cold mountain water his whole hand was numb, but gently he kept the fingers waving, waving, and his arm moving slowly, very slowly, to one side—until with a swift sure lunge he thrust two fingers into the gills of the trout that had hung there all this time resting in the little slow-eddying pool, and he rolled over stiff-armed and brought the fish out twisting silver and frantic onto the grass.

  “Sorry,” Westerly said to the flailing bright body, and he hit it once with a stone and it lay still. For a few minutes he sat hunched in the sunshine, turning and twisting his stiff neck, with his cold right hand cradled in his left armpit to thaw. Then he took kindling and a long knife from his pack, made a fire, gutted the fish and held it skewered on the knife to cook. In the sunlight the fire was scarcely visible, after its beginning smoke; only its heat rippled the air. The silver fish blackened and sputtered, and the smell of it made Westerly’s stomach clutch at him with emptiness. But before he ate, he went once more to the edge of the trees, to look back.

  The moors were empty still. Only the cloud-shadows moved.

  He picked the fish clean and stamped out the dying fire. Then he took the glistening white skeleton, tipped still with head and tail-fin, and laid it across the blackened twigs pointing back the way that he had come. He took out his knife and raised it high, stabbing the blade down into the ground behind the white bone-arrow’s tail, and hesitantly, trying to remember, he said some words under his breath.

  And the skeleton of the fish called out, in a thin high scream shrilling like a cicada, and Westerly knew that there was danger, that he must go on.

  He threw bone and ashes into the swift water, wiped his knife clean, shouldered his pack and set out once more, striding wearily towards the upland path that led away over the hill.

  CHAPTER 2

  Cally sat in the apple tree. It grew less comfortable each year, but it was still her place to be alone. Round her head, leaves dappled the sky, with everywhere among them green bud-small apples clustering. A branch poked into Cally’s leg, prickling even through the tough jeans; she shifted, and petals showered round her like spring snow. “Better keep out of the apple tree,” her father had said that morning, lying frail and listless in bed when she took his breakfast upstairs. “The blossom will be setting.”

  But still she went back. Whenever she climbed the apple tree, she could hear the long soft breathing of the tall poplars that filled the sky beyond the garden; her mother said they sounded like the sea. Cally had never heard the sea, or seen it. She would lie back on a branch sometimes when the wind blew, and try to imagine that she was being rocked by the waves. It was a way of trying to forget the thing she had known for six months now: that her father was dying.

  A cowbell clanged from the house: it was her private summons. She slithered down, a twig scratching the back of one hand. When she reached the house a line of tiny red beads of blood had sprung up on the skin; she licked them away, tasting salt.

  Her mother said, “Your father’s going away for a little while.”

  He stood there docile in overcoat and slippers; Cally thought again how small he seemed to have become since he had been ill.

  “He’s going to a special hospital by the sea,” her mother said, with a curious mixture of pleading and bravado in her voice. “The change will do him good.”

  Cally saw that the front door was open, and a long dark blue car standing at the gate. She hugged her father. “Can we come and see you?”

  “Soon,” he said. He patted her shoulder wearily. “That’s my lovely girl.”

  Cally’s mother pulled up the collar of his coat, and stood with her arm around him. Then there was a tall figure at the front door, reaching down, picking up the suitcase waiting on the floor. Cally stared. It was a woman, older than her mother yet somehow more strongly alive; from the lined pale face and the frame of white hair, startlingly blue eyes looked keenly into her own.

  “Hallo, Cally,” the woman said. Her voice was soft, with a lilt of accent.

  Cally smiled uncertainly.

  “We’ve met before;” the woman said, “but only at a distance. We shall meet again soon.” She took Cally’s father’s arm, very gently. “We’ll take good care of him.”

  Cally and her mother followed his slow shuffling way out to the car. A uniformed driver helped him into the back seat, and settled a blanket round his knees; the woman sat beside him. A small sudden wind blew Cally’s hair across her face; then the car was gone. She felt a quick surge of fear that she would never see her father again.

  Cally’s mother took her hand and held it, hard.

  “Are you all right?” Cally said.

  Her mother said, “Let’s go in out of the wind.” She turned Cally’s hand in hers; both were smeared with blood. “You’ve hurt yourself!”

  “Only a scratch,” Cally said. “And only on the back.”

  But her mother was looking at the palm, as Cally had known she would. The palms of both Cally’s hands were strangely marked, and had been since she was born; at the base of the fingers the skin was rough and thickened, so that it was difficult for the hand to curl into a fist. Her mother’s hands were the same; it was, she said vaguely, an obscure inherited disease. Cally was used to the ugliness of it, and paid it little attention, but her mother was always concerned that she might damage the thick, slow-healing skin. She said now, anxiously, “I wish you wouldn’t climb trees.”

  “Oh Ma!” Cally said. She looked up the empty road, after the vanished car. Sh
e said, “I meant to tell Dad—the blossom’s all set. There’ll be lots of apples this year.”

  “The change will do him good,” her mother said.

  But she missed Cally’s father, and she pined for him. It was a while before Cally noticed the change in her; this was examination time at school, and from morning to night her head was full of Latin verbs and the structures of molecules. Only after the examinations were over did she look properly one day at her mother across the dinner table, and see the shadowed eyes, and the deep lines that seemed not to have been there before. Like her father in his illness, her mother seemed somehow to be shrinking; there was an uncanny look of him in her lean, hollowed face, and a sound of him in her voice, hoarse with fatigue.

  Cally said in concern, “You do look tired. I haven’t been helping enough.” She got up to clear the table and looked accusingly at her mother’s half-full plate. “And you aren’t eating, Ma.”

  Her mother glanced at the plate without interest. “You always help. You’re a good girl. But I am tired—it was all those months when your father. . . .” She looked up suddenly, the thin, pointed face like an appealing child’s. “Cally—would you mind if I went to see him, on my own? You can come as soon as school’s over. Would you mind?”

  “Of course not,” Cally said.

  “Your Aunt Tess will come and stay.” Her mother was looking at her but not seeing; she was lost in her own images. “I may be gone for a while—there are some tests they want to do. . . .”

  “Tests?” Cally said. “On you?”

  “Just checking up,” her mother said vaguely. “They want me to go tomorrow. Tess can’t come till Sunday, though—”

  Cally put an arm round her, feeling suddenly warm and maternal; it was an odd reversal, after all the years of running to her for comfort and support. “Just don’t worry. You go. So long as you can rest while you’re there.”

  “Oh yes,” her mother said. “Oh yes. And I shan’t be far away.” She patted Cally’s hand, and kissed her, but the shadows were still in her face and eyes. Suddenly Cally felt was a long time since she had seen her mother smile.

  But she heard her singing, that night, as she lay in bed: a strange, wordless half-tune that seemed to bring a flicker of memory into Cally’s listening head from long ago. Her mother was in her own bedroom; she could hear her moving about.

  Cally called, “Ma? What’s that?”

  The crooning stopped abruptly. “Just an old song I used to know.”

  “Did you ever sing it to me, when I was little?”

  “I may have done. Sleep well, now.”

  In a little while she began to hum softly again, so that the music was still drifting through Cally’s mind when she fell asleep.

  • • •

  When Cally came home from school the next day, the long dark-blue car was standing at the gate again. The driver jumped out when he saw her, and went round to open the rear door; her mother was sitting inside. She had a blanket wrapped round her knees, just as Cally’s father had done, and again Cally thought she looked strangely like him: the same fragility, the same remote, shadowed eyes. She felt fear hollow in the pit of her stomach, but she smiled at her mother and slipped into the car to hug her.

  Her mother kissed her cheek gently. I’ve left the telephone number, and everything you and Tess should need. She’ll be here the day after tomorrow. Now you’re sure—”

  “I’m going to be fine, Ma. If I get lonely I’ll have Jen come over—or I can go to her house. Give my love to Dad. Is he—”

  She stopped. After the first talk when they had faced her with the news of the disease that was wasting her father away, her parents had never mentioned it again; it was as if they felt safer in silence.

  “There’s money in the kitchen drawer if you need it,” her mother said. She kissed her again. “Don’t stay up too late, now.”

  Cally grinned. “With Aunt Tess around? Goodbye, Ma.”

  As she clambered out of the car, a figure in the front seat turned, and Cally saw that it was the woman with silver hair who had come for her father. She said nothing to Cally this time, but only smiled; the blue eyes were bright, watching.

  Then the car was moving off, driving down the road. Cally waved it out of sight. She could see the white blur of her mother’s face turned, looking back, all the way.

  There was an unfamiliar itching in the palms of her hands; she rubbed them absently with her fingers as she went into the house. She was remembering what the silverhaired woman had said when she drove away with her father, that other day. “We shall meet again soon. . . .”

  • • •

  In the refrigerator Cally found food for several days, carefully labelled: cold chicken, ham, stew to be warmed up. (“Heat in double boiler for fifteen minutes,” said the note in her mother’s neat hand, “and DON’T FORGET TO PUT WATER IN POT!”) Cally made herself a cup of tea. She had expected to feel lonely but instead was cheerful; to be alone and in charge of the house was like a game, as if she were camping out. She found she was pleased that her aunt would not be coming to keep her company for two days yet.

  Then she heard the singing.

  It was her mother’s wordless humming, the same oddly unfinished tune: a voice in the air. In the first shock she thought it was indeed her mother’s voice, that she might have come back for something forgotten, but though she went through every room in the little house, in search of the singing that gently filled it, there was no one there. She checked the radio and television sets, and the record-player; all were firmly switched off. Yet the singing went on, soft, insistent, coming from nowhere: rhythmic waves of melody repeated over and over again. Cally was too puzzled to be alarmed. She sat on the stairs, chin on hands, listening, and gradually the singing died away.

  After a while she thought she must have imagined it. She ate some supper, talked to her friend Jen on the telephone, watched a television film and went to bed. She slept deep, but when night faded to day she began dreaming of the apple tree at the end of the garden. She was sitting up there between the embracing branches, swayed by the wind, looking out at the great poplars that sounded like the sea, and the steady rustling breathing of the poplar trees grew higher and louder, filling her ears, wave after wave, filling the air. Cally woke gently out of her dream, the sound carrying her into consciousness as if she were borne in a boat—and when she was awake she found she could hear the singing again.

  It was the same voice, the same melody, but not continuous this time. The familiar phrase came twice, or three times, then died gradually away into silence. For a few moments she would hear nothing, and then a snatch of it came again, far away. Silence once more: then it was back, clear, close, yet still untraceable.

  Cally padded into her parents’ empty bedroom and picked up the telephone.

  “Jen?”

  “Cally! I’m not awake. Are you awake? D’you know it’s only seven o’clock in the morning? On a Saturday?”

  “Sorry,” Cally said.

  “Lucky I got to the phone first. If you woke my dad—”

  “I’m sorry,” Cally said. “I didn’t look.”

  Jen said, more normally, “What’s up?”

  “I can hear that singing again.”

  “Like last night?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s just the same, the voice like Ma’s, the same song. Only now it comes and goes.”

  “You sure she isn’t there?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Hiding under the bed maybe,” said Jen, and giggled.

  “Listen!” Cally said suddenly. “There it is again, much louder, all round me. Listen!” She held the telephone out to the room, to the air filled now with the strong sweet voice, the curving half-shaped melody pulsing in her ears. Then she brought the receiver close again. “You hear?”

  “I can’t hear anything.” There was no longer a laugh in Jen’s voice. “Except the wind. Look, Cal, there’s hal
f a gale blowing outside. It must be the wind in the chimney, or the telephone wires, or something.”

  Cally said, “It’s a voice, singing.”

  Around her, the singing faded once more into a thread of sound, far away, that she could scarcely hear.

  “That’s weird. Cal, that’s really weird. You better come stay over here.”

  “You ever heard the sea?” Cally said, straining her ears to catch the plaintive rise and fall of the distant song. “I think it must sound like the sea. A long way off.”

  “Come on over,” Jen said nervously. “Come and eat breakfast. I’ll cook sausages.”

  “I’ll call you back,” Cally said. She put down the receiver and went out onto the landing, listening, hunting the sound. Nothing. She washed, pulled on a shirt and some jeans, went back into her parents’ room—and then all at once the singing was back, different, enormously loud, and suddenly Cally was frightened.

  The voice was strident, demanding. The phrase that had been a haunting, plaintive lilt in her mother’s first gentle crooning had changed now to a pattern of hammer-blows, beating at her ears. Cally wheeled about, her hands up in defence, terrified.

  “Ma! Ma!”

  It was instinctive, a cry for help. Where are you? I need you, I don’t know what to do, where have you gone? Ma, Dad, I can’t do without you, you’ve always been here, come back, come back . . . .

  But they weren’t there in the empty house; she was alone with the beating voice. She knew it was not her mother’s voice, for sure now; the harshness and fury in it were totally alien to that familiar gentleness. But why was this the same music her mother had sung, that last day?

  Cally had a sudden nightmare image of her mother hostile to her, of a malevolence aimed at her which somehow was retribution for everything she had ever failed to do, or done wrong. In place of the loving forgiveness she had always known, in her mind she saw her mother’s face twisted with ill-wishing, fierce as the throbbing song which so pressed on her now that she thought her head would split.

  She whirled round again in the small sunny room and came up against her own image in a mirror. It was hardly recognizable: the face blurred like the face of a small distraught child, cheeks tear-stained, eyes red and staring. Cally looked at herself in horror. Behind her reflected figure, green branches tossed in the wind, the green of the tall poplar trees filling half the sky outside. She gazed wildly at them, clutching for comfort from the reflection, and saw around them the carved frame of the tall cheval-glass mirror that was her mother’s pride and joy, brought from some life before Cally had been born. Fish swam around the mirror, carved in oak, between leaves and strange flowers. She had enjoyed running her fingers over them when she was small; she remembered how she used to creep into the room when her mother was dressing, and how she would slip behind the mirror and tip it gently and her mother would haul her out, laughing. . . . Remember, remember. . . . She put her hands over her ears, fighting the harsh throbbing voice.