The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  Maggie has seen blood in water many times. It is not red. In water, blood blackens and it hangs momentarily in the shape it left the body, in the pulse’s shape – clouds of blood, a line of them. It is oddly beautiful. Would this wound have looked like that? And what caused it? What briny injuries can leave a rounded scar?

  It comes to Maggie, then. By candlelight, she pictures it. She imagines him – the Fishman – moving underwater, pulling his body through the shallows with his hands. Perhaps he parts weed. Perhaps he halves shoals of fish, as he goes. Perhaps he moves through the wreck of Anne-Rosa and as he swims with his arms outstretched, his hands pressed together as if in prayer, an eel strikes out at him. One sharp tooth finds its mark; a puff, two puffs of blood.

  Or perhaps he is swimming too close to the shore. A man in rubber wading boots stands on a beach and casts out his line; the hook drops like a coin – plink! The Fishman is close to surfacing. His left hand leads the way until it feels a cold metallic bite. He flinches, and the line does. The fisherman starts to fight …

  She takes his hand, holds it.

  Sea … he says, in his sleep.

  Maggie smiles to herself. She knows enough: she knows what matters most, which is the tiny things – how he kissed Tabitha’s cheek, or cupped a fluttering moth and carried it outside; how he reached for Emmeline’s roses but did not touch them as if he could not manage it. The wound? Its making? It will come. His tale in its entirety will come, she knows – and soon.

  Nancy decides what colours she will use. She selects them carefully.

  And she uses turquoise, yellow, navy-blue, white, an emerald green. She uses her black felt-tip for his beard. She uses silver foil, too – she took a sheet of it from the bottom drawer in the kitchen and she has cut half-moons out of it. One by one, she has stuck these wedges of light onto his tail, so that it shimmers. Her fingers are tacky with glue.

  She leaves his face till last. Faces are, Nancy thinks, the most important part.

  Carefully, she pushes the felt-tip pen onto the paper in two neat dots – the Fishman’s eyes. In red, she gives him a smile.

  There! She throws her hands up, finished.

  Dee glances down, as she passes. Lovely. Well done.

  It’s for Mrs Coyle, she says. For when he goes. So it feels like he is still here.

  He is not in turquoise, or navy. He pulls on a T-shirt that has a yellow trim and a hole in it that Maggie does not recognise. It is too tight, perhaps, but it doesn’t matter. He looks up and watches Maggie – how she stands on one leg to put on a sock, how she twists into her jeans and gives a single jump.

  I know I’m not sleeping with a fish.

  No.

  Then who are you? Why do you talk of the sea in your sleep?

  The sea?

  I’ve heard it. You say ‘sea’ – something like it.

  * * *

  There is the steady squeak of metal in the lane. Emmeline hears it. She kneels amongst her flowers, and looks up. A bicycle.

  Her sister lifts her right leg over the saddle as she comes closer, half-dismounting whilst the bicycle still squeaks. Tabitha wears floral shorts that billow, as she rides, and she has pink socks pulled to the knee. A rattle over a pothole. She steps down.

  Hello, Em.

  Emmeline shifts her jaw from side to side. Yes? What?

  It has taken her this long to be brave. That’s the truth of it – that Tabitha might be the age she is and she might have worked with disease and famine and she might have brought countless lives into the world and held countless hands as their lives have ended but she has been anxious about coming here. To Easterly. To her sister who has had a deep vertical line on her forehead throughout the years of their quiet war.

  No, they have never been close. They rarely shared beds as other sisters might, and they were rarely playmates. But still – they have the same parents. The same blood.

  Why do we never talk?

  What? We talk.

  We don’t. You know what I’m talking about.

  The peonies have long gone. This is, instead, the time of the hydrangeas which bloom like paper balloons, like powdery balls of blue stars, blue light. They have a sound, when the wind comes.

  Emmeline gives a hard laugh. We’re talking about this now? Really? She drops her trowel to the ground. You know why we don’t talk. You.

  Me?

  I had to choose.

  Choose?

  You made your feelings clear, Tabitha. I was married. I loved him.

  Softly, you never had to choose …

  Oh, I did. And I chose my husband because that is what you do, when you marry. You stand by him. Just so you know.

  Tabitha wants to say more. Words come to her and sit in her mouth but she keeps them back. The time has long since passed. Instead she says you do know it was out of love? That I said what I did?

  High up, a gull drifts. Love? How was it love?

  Of course it was love! You’re my sister!

  Emmeline is angry, now. How you spoke to me …

  Was wrong. I was eighteen and stupid. But you had bruises like –

  She holds up her hand, stopping her.

  They face each other. One woman wears gardening gloves, has her hair pinned neatly into a ball at the nape of her neck; the other shifts in her bright-pink socks, pushes her spectacles back up her nose. The gull calls out. The light is fluid, changing over them.

  It feels like they are talking about different people, perhaps. The Emmeline who’d been nursing Hester back then had had hair as shiny as a conker and eyes to match, and her waist was half the size of this Emmeline’s, standing here. But the teenage Tabitha was different too – so young, so unaware of what lay ahead of her. Unaware of herself.

  Talk to me. I didn’t mean to hurt you …

  Emmeline looks old, suddenly. It floods her – age, tiredness. By looking down at the flowerbed, she seems to show the skin under her eyes, the hollows in her cheeks, the slight jowls. I was never going to leave.

  Because you loved him?

  Yes. Because I loved him. You haven’t married, Tabitha. You don’t know –

  Tabitha scoffs. You think he loved you back?

  Don’t judge him. Don’t you dare when you don’t know what Jack had endured. Why do you think he would loiter up at the lighthouse like that? Have baths with us? Sleep in our spare bed? Don’t you know what that father of theirs put them through? Don’t you dare …

  They look at the hydrangeas. There is less than a metre between them, but it feels like a sea that cannot be crossed – too wide, too deep. A sadness finds Tabitha. She is suddenly weighed down by it. I heard rumours about Jack’s father …

  Well, the rumours weren’t even half of it.

  I didn’t know.

  No, you didn’t. Jack had cigarettes put out on him. He had a pitchfork – a pitchfork! – pushed into his thigh. How could I blame him? When it was all he knew?

  Tabitha shifts. She says doesn’t make it better.

  It is like the bones have been taken out of her sister’s face, or the blood has, for Emmeline greys and looks down. Tabitha wonders if she has ever talked of this before and she thinks no, she can’t have done. Who would she have spoken to? She would have had no-one to tell – it was a secret and a huge one and so Emmeline would have put it in an airtight tin like an old piece of cake, kept it out of sunlight. She should have been able to talk to me, she realises. I was the only one. But Emmeline never could. Tabitha had been away, mending people, when she should perhaps have stayed and mended this person – this one, in front of her now.

  They look at each other. They can see their whole lives.

  Em, I am so sorry.

  And Tabitha does what she has not done for a long, long time or maybe ever. She reaches out. She puts her hand on her sister’s arm, holds it. Emmeline does not pull away. They both look at this hand, this arm.

  They are together for the rest of the day. They put manure into the flowerbeds, prune the
roses down. They do not say much to each other. What is there left to say? It has all been said, and Emmeline had turned when Tabitha had touched her, stepped a little closer. Their first embrace in a very long time.

  So much happens that hurts, in life. It doesn’t stop, or not for long. Bodies can ache and love can be uneven and kind, gentle men are drowned and never found. But Tabitha knows there are also offered days. There are lives that are saved, against the odds. There are moments like this, deadheading rosebushes next to your sister, who is humming a little under her breath, and who has whispered, whilst embracing you, that she is also sorry, and that yes, yes – she has always missed you too.

  * * *

  At Tavey, the Fishman stops sawing, looks up. He thinks it will be Leah – he is expecting Leah, for she has been painting the doorframes, the new skirting boards and she said that she would come today. But it is not Leah.

  A man walks towards him – sun-lightened hair. The Fishman knows the face but he knows the voice better, for it was this man’s voice which he heard before all other voices. On a beach of stones, saying oh God, oh God. Oh my God.

  Sam. He comes, and he stands with his hands by his side. As if he has no wish to stay long he says I have to know you’re going to take care of her. I need to know you aren’t going to hurt her. Are you going to hurt her?

  He looks at the boy’s face. It is set, determined. I promised her I wouldn’t.

  Will you promise me?

  I promise you, he says – I will not hurt her.

  Sam exhales. He nods once, accepting this.

  You care for her?

  Yes. I want her to be happy.

  She doesn’t blame you, Sam. She told me so – she never did.

  But I do. I blame me. I took those guys out in the boat – it was my boat, my life-vest. If you’re skipper, you’re in charge of everything on that boat, and … His hands go in his pockets. Every day I’m there again. Wishing I’d done things differently.

  We can all think that. A sheep calls, near them. It sounds like he was a good man. Tom.

  The best. He’d take me out lobstering. He helped me fix up Sea Fairy when I first bought her. He glances across. You love Maggie?

  The Fishman says yes. I do.

  And with that, Sam leaves. It was all he came for, all he needed to know.

  * * *

  Ian has not worked today. He slept for most of the morning. When he woke, he went downstairs to find Constance bending down; through the oven’s glass door he could see a pie. He went to her, kissed her. Hello, wife – smiled.

  He went to see his mother and found her in the garden – not gardening, but sitting on a bench with Aunt Tab beside her, both of them drinking glasses of white wine. It had been a brand-new sight. Ian had stared, trodden back.

  When had they last sat, like that? Talking?

  And he thinks, not since we were children. Or maybe not even then.

  So it is children he thinks of, as he walks back from Easterly. Nathan had never wanted any of his own. He always shrugged, said no, not for me – without giving a true reason. But Ian thinks he knows the reason, now: a fear of inheritance. That old Bundy curse.

  Tom, too, had mentioned it – children. Only once. One morning in sunshine, outside the barn, he’d said, Mags and I are going to start trying. For a family. Next month. And Tom had done his best to be composed, but failed – he’d grinned, blushed, and added Ian, I can’t wait … And what a father he’d have been. What a mother in Maggie, too. Would their children have been dark or fair? Brown-eyed or blue-? No-one will ever know, now. For that was one of the last conversations Ian ever had with his youngest brother: within a week Tom was diving in to save a boy he didn’t know, and in doing that he killed all his future children before they had been made, and their future children, and theirs.

  He stands by the fridge in Wind Rising, takes out the milk. He drinks it from the carton, leaning back.

  It has become easy to stop seeing the miracle of them: his daughter and son. Maybe he did stop. Maybe he failed to see what they are – unique, remarkable, a fusion of two people and yet their own selves entirely.

  As if he has conjured her, Leah walks into the room.

  She says drinking from the carton? I won’t tell Mum.

  And he stares. He looks at the woman who stands before him – for that is what she is, now. She has caught the sun. She has filled out in the parts that needed filling – her waist, the tops of her arms, a little in the face so that she looks, he thinks, beautiful. She has picked an orange from the fruit bowl and has stuck her thumb into it. And as Leah begins to peel the fruit she says I think you should come to Tavey. Have a look.

  I – He has no words.

  Dad … Teasing him. He’s a lovely man! He is! Look how he’s been to Great-Aunt Tab and Maggie and me. Look what he’s done to the pig farm. She pops a segment of fruit in her mouth, says you should come and see it …

  Everything has changed.

  This orange-smelling Leah with freckles on her face. Leah, with cheeks that are round with fruit. She makes her way out of the room, and the man she leaves behind counts his blessings in a way he never has before. He lists what he is grateful for – from this pie in the oven, to his extraordinary children, to vanilla-scented baths with his vanilla-scented wife. The view from this window. Christmas. Milk.

  The list goes on. It is far longer than he thought.

  * * *

  The night that follows this is starless. But the moon, of course, is nearly full and the lighthouse sweeps its beam – so Rona does not need a torch. She knows where the ditches are. She can see enough.

  At High Haven, she knocks. She uses her fists – four loud bangs against the wood. There are no lamps on, but his car is here. She scarcely waits before she bangs again.

  Still nothing.

  Rona bends. Pushes the letterbox. Through it, she can see the hallway – there are waterproof coats, rows of boots and their tabby cat sits on the bottom step. She sees Rona, blinks. Nathan? No answer except from the cat.

  Rona snaps the letterbox shut. She moves to the kitchen window, presses her hands against the glass and looks in. Then she straddles the old dog cage, tries to open the window beyond. After this Rona climbs onto the bonnet of a rusting car, stands on her tiptoes, reaches up and knocks against the bedroom glass with her knuckles. Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

  For half an hour Rona tries.

  She prowls round the house, smacks its walls with the palm of her hand, returns to the front door and tries the handle and throws her weight against it and says let me IN! It is no use. The door does not open. No face appears at the window. No footsteps behind her.

  She sits for a while, wipes her eyes.

  Then Rona walks back with purpose, towards the turning light.

  Rona of the hurting heart. We’ve all had one of those. We have all picked at the seal of things that have been closed against us, and locked.

  I saw this from Crest. I had chosen to sleep on my own, that night – and I glanced out of the window as I made my way to bed. Rona? I paused. I watched her knock on windows, crouch by the letterbox. She stood like a ballerina on the rusting car.

  That was how I knew. How I guessed.

  Parlans say there are no secrets. But sometimes there are: sometimes, when they are too huge or dark or too painful to be even guessed at.

  Like the flakes of silver that fell on silvered nights, this new realisation came down piece by piece. Above all else, it made me sorry. I thought of Kitty, who always peered into my crate of lobsters and praised them for their size or speckled midnight-blue. I thought does she know? I hoped not. But as I watched Rona, I felt sorry for her too. For hadn’t I searched, also? Pleaded, at night? I had also knelt in mud and called out the name of someone who was gone.

  And Nathan? I considered him, as I stood there. I pressed my fingers to my lips and sifted through the feelings – anger, disappointment, an ache for Kitty’s sake. But who was I to judge? Or assume I knew h
is story? All I knew was that he’d saved me – that four years ago he’d waded into water, gathered me, and carried me back to the land in his arms. I’d kicked, sworn and he’d let me. He’d said I’ve got you … as he’d carried me, whilst he himself had cried. And so I knew that he was a good person. Nathan always has been. I loved him and felt sorry, as I stood there in the dark.

  A blue-sea morning followed. I found a feather on my doorstep – tiny, pale brown.

  It was Tuesday. Like the day they found the Fishman, this day would change my life.

  I had not loved him as soon as I saw him. But, as with my husband, I had known there was something. The potential for love, perhaps – as we might open the curtains and look at the sky and know it could be a clear, warm day. It was a strange knowing. I had laid my head against his chest and felt like I could sleep there; it felt like recognition, as if we’d met somewhere before.

  No, three weeks – or three weeks and four days – had not been long. But so much can happen in three small weeks, just as nothing at all can happen in three months or three years, or three hundred years: it is not time that measures love, or measures how much someone has lived. And I had lived more in those three weeks than I had in the four years before it. What life is it, when you are mourning? When you are lonely but will not admit to it? When you are constantly aware of how many things in life are done or made with two in mind – two hymn books in each pew, two chairs in my kitchen; the tea bags I bought from Milton were rectangular, paired, like two halves so that I’d have to split them with a sound like torn cloth; two rooms in a lobster pot; two eyes, two lungs, two legs, two hands. One mouth but two lips around it.

  I have seen seaweed that’s been left on the highest part of beaches for so long that it’s dried and cracked and looked dead to my small human eyes; and yet the sly tide comes and finds it, and the weed fattens up with water – so it was never dead at all. It was parched, dead-looking. But it had life left in it yet.

  I fattened in those three weeks with him. I found my proper shape.

  All the small, forgotten things which matter, when you’re in love. A song, maybe. Or how a bedroom’s curtain moves in and out, in and out. Sometimes I would find him thinking – sitting on his own, staring far away – and I wished that I could paint or write that moment down. He had a legend’s face – strong and injured; kind and old. I remember how I led him into the rhododendron bushes near the church, one day. I said come here … Took his hand. And they were like a church in themselves in that they were dark and went up, and up. We stood there, side by side, and we watched the world pass by us, not knowing we were there and it was then that he turned to me and said I love you, Maggie. Standing amongst branches and the undersides of leaves.