The Silver Dark Sea

by Susan Fletcher

  No. All she sees is what she’s expecting to see which is her boy, stirring. His hair is thick from sleep.

  Sam? Sammy? How are you feeling?

  And he inhales, turns, rubs his eyes. Better.

  Good. You keep resting. As long as you need to.

  OK.

  I’m just taking Nan to the lighthouse.

  OK.

  She closes the hatch, darkens the room.

  He will sleep for the next nine hours. At some point, Nancy joins him and they sleep back to back, like two halves of a shell opened out on its hinge.

  He wakes in the evening to hear that the Fishman has gone.

  You know of the days. You know of the long walks, the little candles in tinfoil cases that I’d light in church, and stand by. I have told you of Nathan coming to me, saying my name as if it were made of glass. He stroked my arm as he held me. Come to High Haven. Stay with us?

  But I stayed at Crest. I stayed with what I knew. I walked out on the coastal paths and sank into hot baths.

  I missed him – I did. I looked out to the mainland and imagined him. But I learnt, also, that I was missing other things. As I snapped a coloured band over a lobster’s claw, I thought of fields, suddenly. Fields? Why fields? And not the Parlan fields I knew – but deep, green pastures. Molehills and muddy gateways. Cow parsley, waist-high.

  And trees. I learnt that I was missing the hand-spanned green of horse chestnuts, or the summer shade of oaks. Beech woods, in autumn. And I missed rivers, too – or any form of water that did not have salt in it: streams, bogs, waterfalls, duck ponds in a city park or lakes so very still that they had their own clouds in. And mountains, and market towns. Orchards and marshland. Crows that winged above ploughed fields.

  Inland.

  I had rarely said the word. But I pulled back the curtains and said it. And after that, I began to say it more and more.

  I wanted where I had come from – unsalted houses, pavements, woods. I wanted a city’s dark-orange night sky. What was this? This wanting?

  It was homesickness, and like love it grew stronger once it had been recognised.

  Enough of the sea, I told Pigeon. She was the first to know. I’ll be leaving, patting her sides. Back to the mainland, now.

  I left Parla on the Morning Star on a winter afternoon. My collar was turned up to cover my ears and I pulled my hat down so that my eyelashes caught its wool when I looked up at the gulls. As Parla grew smaller Sam came beside me. How does it feel? he said.

  I had no answer. But he stayed there on the back of the ferry with me. We saw the foam beneath us; I saw Parla from the water as the Fishman must have done. And I liked it when the sleet came – the first hard, sideways stones of it so that Sam went into the wheelhouse but I stayed where I was. I felt so alive. Sad, but with a strong heartbeat. Me, with an understanding now of what grief does, and is, and how it can slow your own life down so that it is almost lost, also. But my life was still going; I was not dead. And I had to live it fully, for my own and my husband’s sakes.

  * * *

  Strictly, I did not lie. I was never asked the truth about that night – Pigeon’s secret sailing, or the folded clothes – and so, by never being asked, I never told a falsehood. I merely chose to not speak of all the things I knew. But it is a small difference – I know.

  If I ever have my doubts about the rightness of our actions, I think back to the morning when they learnt that he was gone. I saw how Nan twirled, sang of magic. I saw Hester widen her eyes, half-smile at the news – really? Gone? How on earth …? Leah had shone as she’d searched the outbuildings, and Jim had stood by his bells with a strange, knowing smile. Lorcan had said, well I never … shaking his head, half-laughing, raising his eyes to the skies.

  It comes down to this, in the end: each person on Parla was wanting. We had all been wanting, yearning for a change. To hear there is hope and believe it – as a pig farmer, long ago, had done.

  So, no. There was no Fishman; there never was. But we tried to be him – Joe and I. Together, we swam through the restless sea, raised our tail up to the sky. For we knew about the empty days – how absence hurts, how life flies by, how beauty fades so very quickly.

  Happiness – that’s all. That’s all we were after.

  We had wanted happiness again – for us, and for them. And I reckon that excuses any sleight of hand, or any little moon-white lie.

  Did it work? Did they stay happy, or happier? When Emmeline had walked away from the quayside, having watched me sail away, did she go back to a warm, safe house? Did she find peace, or enough of it? How does she feel when the word Fishman comes?

  For it comes. I know he is spoken of. I know that we – him and I – have left such a story that it’s told often and when it’s not being spoken of it’s turning over in their minds, as seals turn as they swim. His tale is remembered when Hester looks at the seven schoolchildren, all cross-legged on the carpet tiles; it is story-time, but what story can she tell them that might be better than what took place on their own island, and not long ago? They wait. Nancy puts her hand up and says can we have a recent story, maybe? Which is her sly way of having the Fishman’s tale told again.

  And his story is in the mind of Dee, as she waits for her two twin boys to come home. They will be different, she expects that – suntans, scars, the glow of new places and love affairs, the hint of accents, maybe piercings, and they’ll say what’s new, casually, as if Parla will surely be just as they left it when it is not, it’s not as they left it. Wait till I tell them … She waits on the quayside.

  Sea Fairy has been repainted. The barnacles have been sloughed off and she shines.

  And the story is not far away as Emmeline and Tabitha eat scones with jam at the lighthouse tea room and smile like children, with full cheeks. Nor is it gone from Constance as she looks at the oilskins hanging in the porch – new, to Wind Rising, but not brand-new. Once, they were Tom’s, and then Maggie’s – but they are Ian’s oilskins now. His – as the lobster pots are. She’d never have imagined the day he’d sell lobsters as well as sheep, but life has its surprises. He and Nathan have learnt how to catch them; they bring them back on Pigeon. Wide, easy smiles.

  Life is richer for Leah, too. The word Fishman flits through her mind as she unravels the knot of a home-grown lettuce and she sees how nature made it – how each leaf overlaps the smaller leaf that follows, and it amazes her. She pauses, at the chopping board. She wishes she could tell him, but he is not there to be told.

  And Rona? I worried for her. It would be easy to mistrust her for what she did and who she loved – to condemn it. But hearts are oceans in their tug and pull. I imagine the storm of love in her was as all storms are, in that they batter, confuse, shift your navigation away from what you know is the right course and the safer one: I think of it that way. And who was I ever to condemn? How could I? Rona thinks, too, of the Fishman. She thinks of him now, at this moment. The door opens. A man – blond hair, crooked teeth that she sees when he smiles – asks if he can stay in her hostel for a while. Photographer, he tells her – I hear the light is good. He lowers his bags, takes off his coat and as he does so, coins fall to the floor. They race under chairs, run across the wooden floors and there are the quick, neat drum-rolls as they drop onto their sides. Rona laughs. The man tries to step on them, arms held high. Later, they kneel side by side with their heads tilted, looking for money underneath the fridge. She is using a broom handle to nudge the coins out. Did you hear about the Fishman …? Rona asks this, as they’re kneeling. She tells the story but he is not listening. Instead he is thinking this girl is … What? Gorgeous. Inventive. Different from the rest.

  And this. There is this, at this moment: Sam and Leah, walking on Lock-and-Key. It is a blustery late-spring day of showers and light. They are not holding hands and they have not linked arms but they walk so close to each other that the sleeves of their anoraks brush. Sam wants to tell her, sometimes. For over a year, he has wanted to tell Leah the
truth – the cancer, the grief, the passing plastic container and the silent, full-moon journey Pigeon made – for he feels it will amaze her. Wouldn’t she stop walking, clasp her hands over her mouth? But when he looks across at her profile, he knows he cannot. Leah is talking at this moment. She talks of countries she would like to see, the poetry she’d like to write, the beauty of that lettuce that she just unfolded and she moves her hands as she’s talking. Her hair is past her shoulders now. She is womanly and beautiful and Sam knows he’ll never tell her. How she is these days is perfect. She is happy – at last. It is how it should be.

  As for Leah? She knows that Sam has his secrets, and she will not ask of them. Instead she kisses him. It is a small, timid kiss, at first. One kiss, which for so long has been a black X on a bright-blue screen. The second kiss is not so small.

  In time they will travel. In time they will leave Parla to walk in the places that Sam’s twin brothers have returned from so that they look up addresses that have been passed on to them, drink in bars where the twins have been. Sam finds the name Lovegrove in a hostel’s visitor book and it is a strange, good moment – as if the world is, sometimes, small. They duck into temples. They see birds of such colours that they cannot believe such birds exist, but those birds do. They always have. They have just never flown to Parla, Leah says.

  When they get back to the island, they live together. They move into the old pig farm. Sam gets letters from Tom Bundy’s widow on the mainland which always begin Dearest Sam, and he writes back faithfully. He describes the sea for her, knowing she must miss it – silver-flecked or dark or it is white-tipped – the kind that Tom said he liked. Or he writes calm and blue, Maggie. Today the sea is calm and blue.

  I spent my first few inland nights in a single room at The Bounty Inn. The owner remembered me, or partly did. Didn’t you work here, once …? I nodded, spoke a little. Then I bought a whisky, pressed myself into the corner of the bar near the open fire and saw my own ghost from nearly seven years ago – the Maggie who hadn’t yet met a single soul called Tabitha, who’d never caught a lobster or walked on Lock-and-Key. Maggie, who had lately accepted with both grace and resignation the notion that she’d never find love, or be loved in return. She knew so little – that girl. And as I sipped my whisky, I looked at the tables I used to clean, at the velvet-topped bar stools I used to sit on at the end of a night with no knowledge of a man called Tom Bundy, or Crest, or proper loss. No sea stories in me, or none of worth.

  We never know what is around the corner. We can only have faith, and try our best. And so I wrote on a damp napkin all the things I wanted. What would make me happy, in the years ahead? What would lessen the sorrow at what had been and gone?

  I wrote of bird tables, long grass, woods to walk through, streams to drink from. Contentment and recovery for a man called Joe, wherever he might be. And no seas, no saltwater.

  It took a while. But I found most of those things. In the days before Christmas, I saw a handwritten note in a shop window. It said Cottage to Let. Fully furnished. Rural location. I rang the number beneath it. And two hours later I was walking down a lane. Cows steamed in the fields on either side.

  The cottage was like me, perhaps – worn and tired, but not lost. There was life still in it. And it had its own curiosities – an outside loo where swallows had nested; floorboards with their own old song; windowsills so wide that I lay cushions upon them and read my books there, or wrote, or merely looked out at the frosty garden whilst blowing across a mug of tea. That was a hard winter – snow drifted, and I would set across the fields with a hammer to break the ice on the cows’ drinking trough. But I liked such weather. Parla had not seen snow like this. I had not, for years.

  I paid my rent to a farmer – a cheerful, whistling man. He called me Goldilocks, waved as he passed me. His wife left gifts on my doorstep, as if she somehow guessed my story – rosemary bread, a jar of her plum jam.

  I grew vegetables. I sold them in the farmer’s shop. I came to work there, too: my earthy hands were shaken by other earthy hands, and I’d cut cheese or slide homemade cakes into white paper bags. I came to know the people who visited weekly for the same things – feathery eggs, whiskered carrots, apples for stewing, their own jars of that sweet plum jam.

  And so the days passed.

  The days became seasons. Seasons, as they tend to, became years.

  * * *

  We fit the world we are given, as fish grow to the size of the tank they are placed in. And I found my new routines. Daily, I walked through the woods or I’d sit down by the nearest river and watch it flow. After rain, it rumbled; the lower branches dipped themselves in it. I loved the river’s moss, and the dainty prints that deer had left behind.

  I had foxes in the lane. A tawny owl, nearby.

  I wrote to Parla. I’d write to Nathan or Emmeline or the Coyles in their house of bells. Emmeline would sign off with my fondest love, and that in itself felt like a story or far more than three words. She told me Sam’s news, as if I did not know it; she wrote about the holiday she and her sister would have.

  Sam. I saved my longest letters for him. He, without fail, replied to them in his small, uneven hand. And his words took me back to the island. He’d talk of tides and whale sightings; he’d give me the fences that had blown down in the latest gales and I’d read his letters in my sheltered home with my legs tucked up beneath me. As for Leah, he’d describe her in a way that meant I knew he loved her. He wrote of her hands, of the scarf she sank into and how that green scarf matched her eyes.

  In one letter, Sam wrote I think of Joe a lot. Not all the time, but often. Sometimes I think I imagined him – it was all like a dream, wasn’t it? But I know he was here. And I hope he is happy, and mended, and well.

  I hoped it too. I put down his letter, looked out at the field of cows.

  Yes, I hoped it too.

  * * *

  We wear it, don’t we? The loss? Joe had said that to me. He’d seen my grief when we met in Lowfield’s garden. It was what he knew about me before all the other things – my name, or my own story. He thought she is grieving. She is also missing someone. And then, she is beautiful … Or so he said.

  Celia. I have not forgotten her. I never met her, and yet I remember her; I think of her when I see geese, when a moth bumps against my reading light.

  Her name joins Tom’s. She joins him.

  They dance together in another, nearby room.

  I knew Joe had to go. He could not grieve with me; grieving needs space, and it needs so much time. And it needs to be done; it cannot be trodden round or not looked in the eye. And so when I miss him now, it is softly; it is walking through the beech trees and thinking how is he, now? Is he strengthening?

  For yes, I miss him, and yes I’d love to meet him again – one day. But what I want mostly, and above all the other things, is for him to mend. To find his own peace, as much as he can.

  Sometimes I hear footsteps in the lane, and I walk to the window to see – but they are the farmer’s footsteps. Or it is just the trees, or bird sounds. And it doesn’t matter that this is all they are.

  I live my life. There is a robin which has learnt to eat out of my hand, and there is a stream that I can drink from – crouching, with cupped hands – and I tell myself the truth which is anything can happen. Who knows what is coming?

  There is always hope and wonder. The Fishman taught me that.

  The Woman with the Inland Life

  Once there was a woman who lived inland. She had known, for years, the wild water – the boom, the fizz of broken waves – but she had left that water, now. A coastal life can be too hard.

  She came to live near trees. This woman found a house with a wood-burning stove and floors that creaked beneath her weight – and she liked this. She liked the deep, safe silence that came to the house at night; a single branch may tap the window and a tawny owl may call, but no more than that. No storms. No need to rise and go outside to fasten tarpaulins.

/>   No sheep smell on her knuckles.

  Whereas once she’d reached into water and hauled up lobster pots, she now sifted through soil for round, firmer things – potatoes, beetroot, radishes. They fell into her metal bowl like rain.

  By day, she was contented. But by night, she would hear her beating heart and know that it beat for more than living’s sake. For this woman loved a man. She loved a broad, bearded man whose eyes she had seen her own reflection in. And he had loved her, in return; he had held her face in both his hands and said we found each other once. Wasn’t that the hardest part? And so whilst she called herself content, and liked her simple life, she still dreamed. She hoped.

  The woman had her friends. She had cows, waterfalls, a hedgehog that slept beneath her compost heap – and these were good things. She loved them. But sometimes she would look at an empty wooden chair and imagine him – older, but still him – mended, and sitting there.

  She is waiting even now. Not fully, not always – but the dream has never left her. We might pass in the street one day, or walk to the same bend in the river by chance and chance alone … He might step into the farm shop, bright with rain. Or a letter may come, signed Love from Joe. For Joe was his name.

  Who knows what will happen? Perhaps they will find each other: perhaps they will not. Perhaps they will find other lovers, in time. But I know this much: that they have not forgotten. Neither of them have. They both talk of the other in a soft voice. They touch the places on their bodies that the other one has touched and they remember their love at strange, sudden moments: a lifting-up of pigeons, or the smell of fresh paint. Anything the colour of deep, peacock-blue.

  The end? I know my stories. I gathered them like shells on a beach and I tell you this: no story ends with waiting. That is not a good way to end.