by Ruth Park
‘Nothing larger or finer?’ she asked teasingly.
‘Ah, so you’d like a rat? Then I’ll catch you one this very night. We have them by the thousand on board The Brothers, and the ship’s cats are all worn down as small as this with hard work.’
He showed her with finger and thumb.
‘Oh, Judah,’ she laughed, ‘you’re a clown. I’ll miss you when I go home.’
And all at once it hit her. It was like a physical blow, so that she lost her breath, and could scarcely gasp a ‘Good night’ before she fled for the stairs.
Dovey was already in bed and asleep. Abigail undressed hurriedly in the dark, flung herself into bed and buried her face in the feather pillow. It was not possible. Love could not pierce one with a dart, envelop one with an unquenchable fire, all those things that old songs said, that the girls at school said. ‘I saw him getting off the bus and my knees went. I didn’t know what I was doing. I went down the wrong street and left my school-case at the bus stop.’ Or, ‘I just sort of burnt all over; it was unreal. I couldn’t have answered if he’d spoken to me, I was paralytic.’
Mum, talking about meeting Dad. ‘We were both swimming. He was thrashing along and ran into me. Boom! Knocked all the wind out of me. He hauled me out of the water like a wet sack. None of your romantic picking me up and carrying me out. And I lay on the sand whooping. Oh, it was squalid, I can tell you. He said “Why weren’t you watching where I was going, you knucklehead?” Typical. My fault, mind you. His hair was all plastered down, like yellow seaweed, yuk! I just lay there making noises like an up-chucking cat and looking at his blue, blue eyes, and thinking, “I’ve met him at last, my own man. Wonder what his name is?” ’
My own man! When her mother had said that, so spontaneously and gaily, Abigail had been so embarrassed she marvelled that she had not come out in hives all over. The idea of one’s mother coming out with a golden oldie phrase!
But now she saw it was the only phrase there was.
She could scarcely admit it to herself. The most exquisitely delicate sensation touched her, body and mind. The empty place in her heart opened like a flower and was filled.
‘I love him,’ she thought. ‘I love Judah. I’ve loved him all along, ever since he carried me to the window that first night. And I didn’t know.’
She lay awake for hours, in a daze of happiness.
It was like going to another country, seeing landscapes that were not of this world. Yet she had known those landscapes were there: that was why she had always felt empty, incomplete, because she knew they were there and she belonged in them, but she did not know where to look to find them.
The dark room seemed full of diamonds and spangles, as though the light within her was so exuberant it streamed from her eyes and fingers and toes.
The ships moored at the wharves creaked and groaned, hasty footsteps sounded on the cobbles of a nearby lane. In the Chinamen’s laundry the mangle thumped. These sounds were drowned by the bim-bam of thunder, and the dark was suddenly wiped over by lightning. She heard Gibbie shriek above, and Dovey instantly stir.
‘I’m awake, Dovey,’ she said. ‘I’ll go up to him.’
‘Take the cannle, pet,’ said Dovey drowsily and thankfully, ‘and my red gown.’
Abby stumbled up the stairs. The baggy red-flannel dressing-gown smelt of perspiration and the vinegar Dovey had used to sponge the collar and cuffs. Normally Abby would have been sickened by it. But now she was different. These small things did not seem to matter any more.
‘I dunna want you,’ snivelled Gibbie, sitting up in bed like a pale owl, his hair a meagre fuzz. ‘I want my Dovey.’
‘Dovey’s so tired,’ said Abigail. ‘You’ll be a good lad and let her have her sleep, won’t you?’
‘I’m that skeered of lightning,’ he sobbed. ‘’Twill come and get me and grill me like a kipper!’
‘It won’t if I’m here,’ said Abigail confidently. She sat beside him. He smelled sickly and looked like a little death’s-head in the candlelight. And Abigail found herself thinking, ‘It’s a good thing, though. Now Dovey and Judah are safe.’
For an instant she remembered her mother’s dark dewdrop eyes, as she said, ‘You don’t know how powerful love can be’, and she thought how strange it was that love had made her both callous and tender. She did not care if this child died. Though she had never liked him, she had not wanted to deprive him of his life. But now, if his death meant that Judah lived, then she did not care a jot if he died.
At the same time she did what would have made her skin creep a day or so before: she put her arms around his shivering, bony little body and held him comfortingly.
She thought, ‘I think I could even do the same for foul Vincent, the way I feel now.’
‘Want to do Number One,’ said Gibbie. She brought him the chamber-pot; put it away on the wash-stand again.
‘Lie down now and go to sleep. I’ll keep the lightning from hurting you,’ she said.
‘Are you a witch?’ asked Gibbie, big-eyed. ‘Beatie said you wunna.’
Abigail considered. ‘No, I’m not. But I’m very good with thunder and lightning. Shall I tell you some more about Long John Silver and the other pirates?’
But the little boy was asleep in a few moments. The storm had boiled out to sea; she saw its last rip of light across the dark clouds on the horizon. The rain-glass was falling, Judah had said that evening. Would rain keep his ship from sailing? She wished that a hurricane would blow and keep him at home for a week. She stood for a while outside the room where Judah and his father slept. She did not wish to be with him; it was enough to know that he was there.
The rain was very heavy. It crashed down the slopes of Flagstaff Hill and some feared that the new Observatory itself would come sliding down and perch itself like Noah’s Ark on the edge of the cliff. It poured off the High Rocks in torrents and drenched the rat-ridden houses that overhung the alleys. The alleys themselves ran like storm channels. Then the sun would blaze out for a day or two; the air would be full of steams and stinks; people would get out with brooms made of twigs or thick splinters bound in a bush, and sweep away the muck.
Another time Abigail would have been outraged that a city already large and prosperous could tolerate such wretchedness on its front step. But now all the rain meant was that Judah was often at home. She spoke to him little. She helped Dovey wash his wet clothes that reeked of tar and seaweed, turning them constantly as they dried before the kitchen fire.
‘’Twas at a time like this that Aunt ’Melia and the others took the fever,’ said Dovey. ‘For the water gets tainted, and even the gentility die.’
But death seemed a long way from Abigail. Her days seemed filled with richness. She did not ask questions of herself, why she felt this enchanted calm, why she no longer fretted about her mother, her home in that other place. She scarcely thought. She just felt, and lived from day to day.
The coming of love was one thing. Yes, it had hit her like a thunderbolt, as other girls and her own mother had described. But what she felt of love itself seemed different from what she had heard and read. She did not long to touch him or be touched by him. Perhaps, she thought, that comes later.
Now, her whole body and mind and emotions had become exquisitely sensitive and delicate. The simple fact of his physical reality was enough to make her world different. To listen to him, to look at him, occasionally to brush past in the narrow passageways of the cottage, this was enough. More would be unbearable. She looked with intense and uncomplicated joy at the golden glint along his jawbone, his close-set ears, the capable width between thumb and forefinger. These seemed marvellous to her.
She was content with loving. She had not thought about being loved in return, though she believed that surely it must be a law of nature that sooner or later he would look up and see her as she saw him, the only one, the precious one.
There seemed no reason to talk to the others, so she did not speak, unless it was necessary.
Perhaps they would believe she was just sulking about being kept a virtual prisoner.
Dovey’s shattered thigh pained severely in the wet weather. Granny had taken her into her own room, to rub the girl’s leg when the pain was worst.
‘For I still have a little of the healing touch,’ she explained.
Beatie had gone back to her own bed. She was supposed to help Abigail attend to Gibbie, if he needed someone in the night; but the little girl slept like one dead. So the days went past, and on many nights Abby climbed the attic stairs to the sick child and tried to be kind and tolerant with him. She could not help feeling that his insatiable desire for sympathy and attention was not related to his illness, but to his loss of his mother and his constant brooding on death. And how was she to explain these things to people who had never heard of psychology?
She and Beatie had been down to the market to buy vegetables and meat. It was a fine day; the people were out in crowds. She had enjoyed the outing, seeing the old-clo’ shops with the wheeled racks of tattered garments outside, the cobbler with a tall Wellington boot hung as a sign above his door, the itinerant cooks with their charcoal braziers – cooking and selling sausages, scallops, baked potatoes, haddocks, chitterlings – positioned every few yards along Argyle and Windmill streets.
Then, almost out of a blue sky, down had come another summer downpour. The girls had run like hares, but they were soaked, both having dragged off their shawls to cover the goods in case of damage.
They were in their bedroom, changing their clothes, when Beatie all at once said, ‘I have to talk to you, Abigail.’
‘Talk away,’ said Abigail cheerfully. She had been aware that Beatie had been more difficult during the last few days, flying into tantrums, bitter about school, churlish even with Dovey.
Judah had threatened to flatten her ears for her, though he had said it with his usual sunny smile.
‘What you need, my lass, is an outing. I’ll tell ye, I hae the very thing, and we’ll take Dovey and Gibbie too, if the lad’s fit enough. We’ll go cockling next Sabbath … I’ll get a lend of a dory, and we’ll go maybe right across to Billy Blue’s Point!’
But Granny was downright about Gibbie’s unfitness to go into the open air, and the sea wind at that, and Dovey murmured that she’d never get down Jacob’s Ladder at Walsh Bay with her leg as stiff as it was.
‘But ’tis a grand idea, Judah, and Abby will enjoy it, isn’t that true, hen? And Beatie will be clean out of her mind, she loves an outing so.’
But now, in the bedroom, Beatie said gruffly, ‘You! You’re stuck on him, inna that right?’
Abigail had been humming happily. Now she felt as though her blood flowed backwards, so fearful was the sense of privacy breached, of dignity defiled. She stammered, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Dinna try to hide it from me,’ said Beatie. ‘I seen it in your face. Look at you now, red as a radish. You’re stuck on him, my brother Judah.’
‘You mind your own business!’ cried Abigail.
‘Blind me if it inna my business!’ retorted Beatie.
Abigail pulled her shift over her head. In its depths she managed to compose her face, force her outrage to subside.
She pulled down the shift and fastened the tapes of her drawers.
‘And suppose you’re right, what’s the matter with that? Not that I’m saying you’re right!’
‘Because Judah thinks you’re just a child, like me. That’s one thing. And the other thing is he’s promised.’
‘Promised,’ whispered Abigail. ‘What is promised?’
‘Are you daft? He’s betrothed to Dovey. He’s always been promised to her.’
It was as if the light had diminished. Abigail finished dressing, brushed her damp hair and tied it back. She did all these things automatically, her eyes fixed on Beatie’s face.
‘Stop girning at me!’ ordered Beatie testily. ‘What else did you expect? Dinna Judah lame her, when she was but a wean, flitter-brained scamp that he was? Not every man wants a lame wife, so he owes her something. But no matter about that. How could he help loving Dovey, beautiful and good as she is?’
‘In my time she wouldn’t be thought beautiful,’ said Abigail, and was immediately ashamed.
‘And in this one you’re no oil painting,’ snapped back Beatie, ‘and neither am I, come to that. But I’m telling you now – Judah belongs to Dovey, and they’ll marry as soon as he’s out of his time.’
‘But I’ve never seen him kiss her or anything,’ said Abigail half to herself. ‘How could anyone guess they are promised?’
‘Kissing! That’s no’ for Orkney folk,’ cried Beatie haughtily. ‘We keep our feelings to ourselves.’
‘Not you, I notice!’ flashed Abigail.
‘And anyway,’ continued Beatie, ‘such things are for after the betrothal, when Judah is out of his time, and is old enough to wed, and gives her a ring. She’s to have a garnet in a band of gold – real gold.’
‘Groovy,’ said Abigail numbly.
‘I dinna ken what that means,’ said Beatie gruffly, ‘but I can tell by your mug it’s no compliment. I’m telling you straight, I’ll not have you come between them. I’ll break your head first.’
‘Be quiet!’ said Abigail, in so cold a voice that Beatie faltered. Her fiery gaze dropped, and she muttered, ‘I hanna any right to speak like that. I ken no other way but to bluster, you see, Abby, because it’s the way of folks about here.’
Abigail was silent.
‘Nobody’s going to make Dovey unhappy,’ said Beatie sullenly. ‘Nobody. Not while I’m around. Granny’d let her lose Judah if it meant saving the Gift. The Gift comes first with Granny, but it dinna with me! And Dovey’s sae gentle – she’d never stand up for her rights, even if her heart broke.’
‘Has Dovey noticed too, then?’ asked Abigail. Beatie shook her head. ‘She hanna mentioned anything. Well, then,’ she said, with a return to her previous aggressive manner, ‘what will you do about it?’
‘This,’ said Abigail. She seized Beatie by the shoulders and shook her with such violence that when she let her go, the little girl fell on the floor.
She gaped at Abigail, not knowing whether to screech maledictions, or leap at the older girl like an infuriated monkey.
‘You’re a stirrer, that’s what you are,’ said Abigail. ‘Don’t you breathe a word of this to Dovey or I’ll break your head. You don’t know that what you said has a word of truth in it.’
‘Granny will know,’ said Beatie, half tearful, half triumphant.
‘Yes, and I’m going to see her, right now,’ said Abigail.
Chapter 9
The old lady removed her brass-rimmed spectacles and put aside her knitting.
‘Ah, there you are, pet,’ she said. ‘I’ve been expecting you this last day or two.’
Abigail sat down beside Mrs Tallisker’s chair and leant her head on her knee. The touch of the work-hardened hand on her hair was dear and familiar to her.
‘You feel that something verra frail and precious, maybe like a china cup, has been chipped and cracked, is that so, Abby?’
Abigail thought about that.
‘No,’ she said at last, ‘it hasn’t been spoiled or changed. I just didn’t want her – Beatie – or anyone, to look at it because it was private.’
The hand went on stroking.
‘I suppose I’m too young to know anything about – about falling in love,’ said Abigail humbly. She knew she could never have spoken like this to her mother. She would have died in torment rather than say such a thing to any of the girls at school. It seemed to her now that they were just a bold-mouthed, sniggering rabble of children, too old to be innocent, too young to be fastidious.
‘But I suppose that’s not fair, either,’ she thought. ‘How do I know what they feel in their hearts? They talk like that because other kids think they’re freaks if they don’t.’
‘It wouldna be for me to say that you’re too young to know
true love, Abby,’ said Granny tranquilly, ‘for I was wed at fifteen myself.’
‘And you’ve not forgotten what it’s like?’ asked Abigail, amazed.
‘Look into my eyes,’ said Granny. She took Abigail’s chin in her hand and made the girl look steadfastly at her. The cloudy blue of the old woman’s eyes cleared, widened, became a sky with clouds running over it like lizards over a wall, a sea far below, leaping, boiling, a marvellous blue-green.
‘Like a mallard drake’s neckband.’ She heard Granny’s voice far, far away, hardly distinguishable from the squealing of the birds, white and dark birds whirling in to and out from precipices that stood like walls and battlements.
‘Guillemots, sea-shag and terns,’ said Granny. ‘Look at yourself, lass.’
Abigail was no longer herself. She was someone else. A dark-brown braid streaked with blond fell over her left shoulder almost to her waist. Her hands were red and chapped. She wore a coarse ankle-length black skirt and a white apron. The very eyes through which she looked were different – clearer, further-seeing, and, she instinctively knew, desperate and wild.
‘My own e’en,’ said Granny, ‘when I was eighteen, new-widowed.’
Down that giddy steep Abigail gazed, her whole body thirsting to thrust itself out on that wild wind that whirled the birds down to the sea and up again in tatters and ribbons and shoals of small living bodies; to fall like a stone amongst the black shining reefs and the ever-tossing serpentine arms of the kelp.
‘I can’t, I can’t!’ cried Abigail, and her voice was different, her words in a dialect she did not know yet understood. ‘There are the bairnies, there are my old parents and yours, Bartle. I cannot come and leave them without a care, I must live on, in spite of pain.’
‘I can’t bear it,’ whispered Abigail. ‘I can’t bear it!’
In a second she was back in the parlour. Mrs Tallisker, her eyes very bright, was gripping her hands.
