Secrets of the Sea

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  She crossed her arms. “You don’t like my husband, do you? I don’t like him much myself.”

  “No, I don’t like Ray a lot. But more than that–and I never quite got over this–he really let this farm go to wrack and ruin when it was his to look after.”

  “Alex, I never knew that!”

  “It’s not something I like to talk about. I never told Merridy. I’m just hoping to God that Jack doesn’t put his fine acres into Ray’s hands, that’s all.”

  He switched the kettle on.

  She was thinking about what he had said. “But you’ve made such a success of it, haven’t you? And you have Merridy. And now you’re going to have a baby.” It might have been Tildy who was having the baby, such a burst of unexpected goodwill did she feel in that moment. Towards him, towards her cousin. All thought of Ray dismissed as she remembered: “Merridy wanted me to hug you for her. I don’t mind telling you, Alex, I’ve often thought of hugging you for myself.”

  Then, arms outstretched, she was advancing towards him: “Talk to me, Alex, don’t go into one of your long silences…No, I don’t want tea. I want you to talk to me and tell me how happy you are.”

  And while he had uttered not a word–not one word!–she was moved by his response.

  Because what he experienced was an ungovernable wish to put his arms around her and press his cheek against her plump cheek and kiss, out of some tremendous gratitude, the top of her head where she had gathered back her hair to expose a lined, freckled face. Not speaking, just standing in the middle of the kitchen, holding her.

  Hair, table, light–all trembled.

  Then the fly-screen was squeaking and the door opening with a rush of cold wind and Tildy was leaving.

  She wound down the car window and shouted: “I’ll tell her you are lovely, Alex. The happiest man in the world, too. Is that what I’ll tell her? Get down, Midge, you bastard. You’ll scratch the seat.”

  Merridy ran deep for four days and then on the fifth she called. He was reading beside the fire in the living room when the telephone rang on the little glass-topped table. He picked it up.

  “It’s me,” said her voice. Calm but guarded.

  “Yes.”

  He enquired after Aunt Doss, who had had her hair dyed and looked foxier. He asked Merridy how she was feeling and she replied that she had stopped being sick and added that she was going the following day for an ultrasound scan.

  “Tell me how it goes.” There was nothing else he could think of to say. He did not really want to hear how it went.

  But the following evening he sought her reassurance that the baby was all right. He listened as Merridy told him how Aunt Doss had accompanied her to Dr James. They had sat before a monitor and watched the image of the child.

  Dr James had guided Merridy through the body parts: “Nice arch of foot. Spine there is really healthy. Legs look good. That’s the ventricle. The cerebellum at the back of the brain is the normal dumb-bell shape. Lips. That black circle there is the stomach.” Next to the circle, the heart was beating in flashes. “A very nuclear heart,” Dr James said approvingly.

  “What did it look like to you?” Alex asked.

  The baby–moving within its skirt shape–provoked a stream of disconnected images in Merridy: corn on the cob, frogs’ legs, Churchill, a crab, the black-and-white footage of Nagasaki.

  “Do you want to know the sex?” she said.

  “Not particularly.”

  “Well, if you change your mind…”

  “What is it?”

  A pause.

  “Merridy, tell me.”

  Another pause. “Boy.” She coughed. “A boy.” And explained how the midwife had given the game away. “I asked her if you could tell the sex at this stage and she said: ‘Oh, yes,’ and pointed: ‘There’s his little penis sticking out.’”

  “I thought of him as a boy for some reason,” Alex said, unscrewing the cap on the bottle. “What did he look like again?”

  “He looked like an old man on his back with a large bald head and his chin tucked in. And, Alex, do you know what his first gesture was? He put his right hand up to his forehead.”

  Alex could not help but smile. “That’s what you do in your sleep.”

  “Just imagine, Alex. My baby is going to have a very nuclear heart. What do you suppose that means?”

  He ran his finger around the lip of the bottle. “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  He clammed up. But it was not a hostile silence and they both knew it.

  So was established a pattern that continued over the days that followed. He only drank gin when they had these telephone calls; the Geneva talks, as he came to think of them. He had bought himself a new bottle and when the telephone rang he poured a tumbler and sat in the living room and sipped. As the gin went down, the warmth rose, but it was not an alcoholic heat. It was something else.

  They talked in a way that they had not talked in years, maybe never talked. Merridy started to uncover in him an intimacy, and Alex to renew an old pleasure and sense of possibility. And not really having spoken on the telephone in his life, he now talked himself into closeness. Their nightly conversations were a little shell that both crawled into. Together with Merridy he returned in shy, but increasingly jubilant, steps to their first encounter in the lane behind the school; their honeymoon on Flinders, digging for Killiecrankie diamonds, the film that he had taken her to see in Whitemark, and the low-flying peacock that cracked the windscreen of their hired car. With recovered optimism, they went over and celebrated the work, time, energy that each had invested in the house, the farm, Oblong Oysters. They remembered the rapacity of their bodies.

  Distance protected them. He was spared the sight of her belly; it would have been a reality too harsh to see his wife’s stomach growing with a baby not his own. On the other hand, when the baby began to kick or had hiccups or Merridy had to go to Dr James for the amniocentesis, he surprised himself with his anxiety.

  One evening, getting ready for her call, he was drawing the curtains in the living room when he caught sight of his reflection in the window and teased himself. He had never considered what a dignified cuckold might look like, but now he knew.

  Her line was engaged that night. When they spoke the following evening she told him of an emotional conversation with her mother. “I’m trying to make sense of it. She wants to leave the Sanctuary.”

  “What, and live with Doss?”

  “Don’t laugh. She plans to move in with an old boyfriend–the man she was engaged to before she met Dad.” Randal Twelvetrees had been constrained to get in touch with Mrs Bowman after his father alerted him to the discovery of Hector’s remains. The Minister’s son explained–in the letter that he wrote from Albany and which was forwarded on by Doss–how he had nursed his wife through a long illness and was now a widower. After speaking with her mother for three hours, Merridy could not tell if she was acting out of a late-flowering need for companionship or out of a long-held guilt, or whether she wanted to repent for Merridy. “All I know is that Randal went to see Mum in the Sanctuary and made this offer. He has a property–she won’t tell me where it is, except that it’s ‘somewhere in Tasmania, somewhere a long way away’. She’s already making arrangements to have her stuff moved down there.”

  It was not long afterwards that Alex reached his decision about Merridy’s child. “I’d like to raise him as my own,” he told her, and when she started to speak: “I’m not going to ask any questions. I don’t want to know. But as far as I’m concerned, this is my child.”

  Two topics they avoided. The first was the question of her return to Moulting Lagoon Farm. She had left Jason in charge of operations while she stayed with her aunt in Ulverstone. But the oysters were ready to harvest and she had signed a contract.

  What Alex did not tell Merridy was that he had taken to going down to the shed. He asked for Jason’s discretion: “Let’s keep this between ourselves, but I reckon yo
u could do with some assistance.”

  Wary at first, Jason was grateful to have an extra pair of hands. He taught Alex how to cut out the mesh and repair the lanterns and to tie the special knot that would never let anything go–a knot that Alex knew of old, but he said nothing. While Jason was busy handling and loading the stock, Alex mended buoys. He emptied the lanterns and tipped the oysters into the rotary grader and scrubbed down the keels and deck. And one afternoon, leaning against his ute, paper and pencil in hand, was moved to sketch the Zemmery Fidd.

  “Why don’t you come home?” he said to Merridy one night.

  “What?”

  He repeated it twice.

  “When?”

  “What about next week? I’ve got to go to Launceston for a lamb sale. Come down during that.”

  “Next week would be good.”

  “Or is that too soon?”

  “No, no, it’s not too soon.”

  “Merridy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve started preparing,” incapable of containing his excitement. In the Talbot’s closing-down sale, he had bought a small child’s wheelbarrow.

  “But, Alex,” laughing, then tentative, “you do realise he won’t be able to use that for another five years!”

  He felt his face grow warm. But he didn’t care. It was worth more than he could have anticipated to hear the responsive echo of Merridy’s laughter. He treasured it so much that he decided not to tell her about his other surprise, on which he had been working night and day in time for her return.

  So Merridy agreed to drive back to Moulting Lagoon Farm the following Tuesday. She felt quite positive. She had passed through the Stations of her Cross. It might not be his child, but Alex would come to love it as his own. Alex loved her and the child in her was the best part of her. And she knew, now, that she loved him. She was certain.

  The other topic that was not discussed was Kish.

  Merridy, because away from his presence it became easy to forget him. It was almost a convenience to her that Kish had disappeared: she would not have to tell Alex.

  Alex, because he needed to forget.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HE JUMPED DOWN FROM the cabin and ran off along the main street. Opposite the school was a small wooden bus shelter with a bench. He would catch a couple of hours’ sleep, then hitch a ride before the town was up, when the log-trucks started rolling through.

  He crawled into the corner and lay on his back, revolving Alex’s bottle, turning it slowly in his torn fingers. He brought the glass close to his face, but its contents remained dark to him. Too dark at any rate to divine what it obsessed him to see, though he did not understand why. Frustrated, he tucked the bottle under his head and was falling asleep when he heard a woman’s voice.

  Instantly alert, he slid from the bench and looked out. Across the road, a man unlocked the door to the school. Standing beside him was Mrs Dove.

  A little while later he sat crouched beneath the window. He could hear them on the schoolroom floor. They were not piecing together jigsaws or trying out the alphabet or singing “We are the Vegemites”. They were playing doctors and nurses.

  Alarmed by the racket, he at one point rose from his hiding place between the rubbish bins and looked down through the glass, down the slope of a desk. The sight snatched his breath. Below him, upside down, Mrs Dove. Her closed eyes running together to form a smile, her breasts whiter than eggs, her mouth a fluttering eye.

  And sank noiselessly back.

  He had put Alex’s bottle on the ground beside him and he stared into it. He rested his elbows on his knees and sat there staring, until Merridy and the man had finished their ruckus and shut the door behind them and left.

  The man, lifting the lid to throw something in, did not notice him squeezed up against the bin.

  For a few moments more he remained squatting there, his head drowned in his hands and swollen with brackish thoughts. Then holding the bottle by its neck he struck it with one hard blow on the gravel.

  There was the tink of imploding glass and the ship sailed onto the playground.

  He gripped the broken bottle. The way he brought its jagged jaw to his face, he might have been about to lacerate his forehead to release his pain and to stab at the blowflies or red-eyed moths or whatever it was that kept swishing about in his skull. Then with a conscious effort he let the bottle drop and looked around for the Otago.

  The hull adhered to a segment of glass on a strip of withered blue plasticine. He flicked open his knife and fell upon the delicate assemblage–varnished pine, triangles of stiffened cotton, ice-cream sticks–and with the tip of the blade gently levered the penny from its deck.

  He had never been able, not properly, to make out the face on the coin, but now he held it up to the moon. A severe young woman glared back at him.

  Once he had the penny in his hand, his whole being fastened around it. In the front seat of log-trucks he zigzagged his way south to the Huon and spent a fortnight repairing nets for cherry trees on a farm outside Franklin. He made himself useful: dressed in Mr Dove’s jeans and shirt, and wearing Alex’s spare pair of spectacles, he cleared the paths of duck crap and took the garbage to the tip and watered the horses as he had watched Mrs Dove do. At night, he slept in a room, its walls papered with embossed flax. And for companionship caught flies. Bluebottles that he attracted with duck crap into a plastic bag, which he knotted. In his hand, the bag buzzed like a toy running down and then stilled to a splutter. He would sit on his mattress and hold the bag to his ear while he checked his pocket for the coin that he sometimes produced and stared at through Mr Dove’s glasses, and at other times was content to pinch through his trouser leg. As if the sound of the flies was telling him where to go and the penny was courage in his pocket.

  In the meantime, while he thought about what he was going to do, he needed to earn a different currency. Money that would enable him to lie low until an opportunity came to leave this freaky island.

  In Franklin, he read a notice handwritten in black felt pen and pinned to a board outside a boatbuilder’s yard: “MAN WITH VAN NEEDS ANOTHER MAN”. The man was a talkative Englishman: fiftyish, small, with a gold propelling pencil clipped to his T-shirt at the throat. He had longish thinning hair and a crease about the eyes. Left some money by his father, he had decided to start a removals business. That was his explanation.

  His van was a white U-haul. In the front, there was a potted-plant arrangement-tray filled with geraniums that he watered first thing in the morning. His living accommodation was a bunk-bed in the back, where he slept, more often than not while listening to the radio, surrounded by flippers and goggles and oxygen cylinders. The paraphernalia of a skin-diver.

  Next to the bed was an old-fashioned Elsan and a basin where he washed.

  “You can sleep in the bottom bunk,” he said to Kish, who disliked the van immensely.

  Eager to get back outside, Kish stepped onto the tow-bar and jumped down.

  But something intrigued him about the polished metal ball. “Do you have a caravan?” he asked.

  “A caravan? Honestly!” Insulted. “That’s for my boat.”

  Which, he went onto explain, required a complete overhaul. He had put her into the boat yard in Franklin while he earned the money to pay for this.

  For ten weeks, Kish lifted bookshelves and refrigerators and once a piano into the van and drove from one corner of the state to another, unloading, sleeping in the back, listening to the man, who was called Joseph Silkleigh, prattle on about the North African coast, where he had spent time frog-diving; or his father who had blamed his mother for everything, like a bad maid; or the girl he had met on a beach south of Perth who had jilted him, after he had parked his van outside her house once too often. Joseph claimed still to be bruised by the rejection. “She’s that rare thing”–he said it wistfully–“a woman with a sense of humour.”

  Joseph’s past was a country that he had fled, he suggested, in tatters. “I was
the last man out, old soul.” But no experience was ever wasted. All would go into his book. The story of Joseph’s life. An astonishing story. That he had begun and abandoned countless times, and always for the same reason: he did not have the right title. “But now I do. Now I do.” He turned to Kish with an expression of innocent triumph: “I’m going to call it The Making of Me.”

  Kish frowned and then at his lap. “I don’t read much,” he said.

  “You don’t talk much either, Knish, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  “It’s Kish.”

  Joseph nodded as if he did not believe him. “I’m a sod for names. Jewish, are you?”

  “No.”

  “A knish is a dumpling with chopped liver.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I’m telling you it is.” Then: “Not Canadian, are you?”

  “No.” He was worse than the blowflies.

  “I know, I know. When you are down, even dogs don’t come near you. But just how did you get down here, old soul, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “A sailing ship.”

  “A sailing ship, eh? Then you’re a man after my own heart, Knish. I love ships. Spent most of my life on them, wouldn’t be surprised. Yawls, yachts, gin palaces, smacks, hermaphrodite-brigantines, you name it.” He rubbed his nose. “Only ship I’ve yet to sail in is a relationship,” and gave a sad laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.

  They drove through Geeveston.

  “What about you, Knish, do you have a girl?”

  They were heading south with a van-load of second-hand books.

  “Yes.”

  “A nice girl, is she?”

  “She is nice.”

  “Musical?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, as long as you’re happy, old soul,” said Joseph. “Are you happy?”

  Kish said nothing. He eyed the object that he had dug out of his hip pocket and said nothing.

  “What is it with you, Knish? If you’re not fiddling with that ruddy knife of yours, you’re flipping old coins. Not gold, is it? Here, let me see. I used to be a bit of a numismatist.”