by Eva Ibbotson
When they had finished in the mermaid shed, the children were taken to the house for a drink of fruit juice and a biscuit, and then they were sent to help Aunt Coral clean out the chicken house. Fabio’s family had kept chickens in South America so he knew what to do, and he and Coral had an interesting conversation about the tango, which she was fond of dancing under the light of the moon.
‘You don’t happen to know the steps?’ she asked him.
Fabio looked doubtful. ‘I watched my mother when she danced in the cabaret.’
‘Good,’ said Aunt Coral. ‘I’ve always wanted a partner.’
Fabio was not at all sure that he wanted to dance the tango with a very large aunt who had stuffed him in a tin trunk and kidnapped him. But he was too polite to refuse and he had noticed the night before that the moon was far from full so that he could only hope she would forget.
Then in the afternoon things got strange again because Aunt Myrtle took them down to the point to meet the seals.
They lay about by the edge of the water, the cows dozing while they waited for their pups to be born, the bulls jostling each other and shoving to test their strength.
But one seal was sitting quite alone on a rock. He had turned his back on the rough games of the other seals and was staring romantically out to sea. It was the seal who had come close to the shore on the first day; they would have known him anywhere.
‘Herbert, I’d like you to meet Fabio and Minette,’ said Myrtle, just as if she was introducing someone in a drawing room.
Herbert opened his eyes very wide and looked at them. It was an extraordinary look for a seal; both children stepped back a pace; they felt as though they had been weighed up and examined by a great intelligence.
‘He can’t be an ordinary seal,’ said Fabio.
Aunt Myrtle looked at him gratefully. ‘No, dear, you’re absolutely right. Herbert is a seal but he’s a very special kind of seal. He’s a selkie.’
‘What’s a selkie?’ asked Fabio.
Myrtle sighed. ‘It’s not easy to explain,’ she said, ‘because it’s all to do with legends and beliefs. There aren’t a lot of facts.’
‘Tell us,’ begged Minette.
Aunt Myrtle sat down on an outcrop of rock and the children came to sit beside her.
‘All sorts of things are told about selkies,’ she began. ‘That they are the souls of drowned men … that they are a kind of faery and if someone sticks a knife in them they will turn back into humans.’
‘A knife!’ Minette was horrified. ‘How could anyone do a thing like that?’
Aunt Myrtle shrugged. ‘I certainly couldn’t.’ But she blushed, thinking of how she had sometimes wondered what would happen if she did get up the courage. Would Herbert really turn into a man, and if so, what kind of a man? Might he become a showing-off kind of man like a bullfighter, always trailing his cape about? Or a really boring person who thought about nothing except making money?
Herbert had come to the Island many years ago. His mother had brought him because he had a cough which wouldn’t get better and it had got about that the Island was safe even for seals who were not well. The aunts had healed his cough and then Myrtle had played the cello to him and he had stayed.
They had known of course that he wasn’t an ordinary seal. Herbert did not speak exactly, but he understood human speech and sometimes when he and his mother talked together in the selkie language, which is halfway between human speech and the language of the seals, Myrtle could make out … not the words exactly, but the sense of what they said.
‘He had a very famous grandmother,’ said Myrtle, dropping her voice. ‘At least, we think she was his grandmother. She was called the Selkie of Rossay and there are stories told about her all over the islands.’
‘Tell us,’ begged Minette again. She could never get enough stories.
So Aunt Myrtle pushed her hair out of her eyes and began.
‘The Selkie of Rossay was a female seal who lived about a hundred years ago. One night she came out of the sea and shed her sealskin and danced with nothing on by the light of the moon and a fisherman came and fell passionately in love with her.’ Myrtle paused and gave a wistful sigh. ‘You know how it is,’ she said, ‘when people are dancing by the light of the moon.’
The children nodded politely though they didn’t really.
‘So he hid her sealskin and brought her some clothes and married her and she stayed with him and had seven children and they were perfectly happy. Though when they sat down, even on dry days and in completely dry clothes, the children left a damp patch. Not … you know … anything to do with nappies. Nothing nasty – it was an absolutely fresh damp patch – but it showed they had seal blood.’
Herbert was listening most intently. He moved closer, he cleared his throat.
‘Then one day when she was rummaging in a trunk, the selkie found her old sealskin and she put it on and the sea called to her – it called to her so strongly there was nothing she could do – and she dived back into the sea and after a while she married a seal and had seven seal children. But for the rest of her life she was in a terrible muddle, calling her sea children by the names of her land children and her land children by the names of her sea children and never really knowing where she belonged. At least, that is the story.’
Myrtle stopped and Herbert gave an enormous sigh and rolled over on to his side. He might have forgotten how to speak like a human, but he had understood every word and the story Myrtle told was his own.
The Selkie of Rossay had been his grandmother. She had gone crazy in the end from not knowing whether it was better to be a woman or a seal, and Herbert’s mother, the youngest of her seal children, had stayed with her till she died, seeing that she didn’t starve even when her teeth fell out and her eyes filmed over.
Herbert’s mother was still alive; she came ashore sometimes and nudged her son and tried to get him to make up his mind about what he wanted to be because she knew it didn’t matter whether one was a man or a seal so long as one stuck to it.
But Herbert took after his grandmother. He couldn’t decide. When Myrtle played the cello to him it seemed that being human was the best that he could hope for. But when he watched Art and saw what he would have to do if he was a man – wear trousers with braces or zips, and shoelaces and all that kind of thing – he would dive back into the water and turn over and over in the waves and think: This is my world; it is here that I belong.
When the children got back to the house, they found Art with a large piece of sticking plaster on his forehead. He had tried to give Lambert some lunch and Lambert had torn the plate out of his hand and hurled it across the room. Then he’d lain down on the floor and drummed his heels and screamed for his father and his mobile telephone.
‘I’d have thumped him,’ said Art now, ‘but I daren’t. I don’t know my own strength. I might have pulped him into a jelly.’
Fabio didn’t say anything but he was beginning to wonder about Art’s great strength. Meanwhile Lambert was still in the room above the boathouse.
‘But he can’t stay there,’ said Coral. ‘The boy is a fiend. We’ve got to get rid of him.’
But though they discussed it for the rest of the day, none of the aunts could see how this could be done short of killing the child – which they would very much have liked to do, but which was not the kind of thing that happened on the Island.
Chapter Five
When the children came down to breakfast the next day they saw at once that the aunts were worried. Etta’s moustache stood out dark against her pale face and her nose had sharpened to something you could have used to cut cheese.
‘I really don’t want to operate,’ they heard her say, ‘but it’s serious. She’s completely egg-bound.’
‘Who’s egg-bound?’ asked Fabio.
Aunt Etta ignored him.
‘I’ve tried massage; I’ve tried Vaseline; I’ve tried a steam kettle,’ she said to her sisters.
‘What
about castor oil?’ suggested Coral.
‘It’s worth a try, I suppose.’
‘Can we help?’ asked Minette.
‘No.’ Etta looked up briefly. ‘Well, perhaps you can carry the buckets. We’re going up the hill. And kindly fold your napkins properly when you leave the table. You left them in a disgusting heap yesterday.’
It was quite a procession which wound its way up the hill. Etta carried an enormous bottle of castor oil, Fabio lugged a footstool and a primus stove, Minette had two buckets and a bundle of rags.
The path was steep and the morning was warm but Aunt Etta kept up a fierce pace. She also chose to give them a lecture as she went.
‘Now I want to make it absolutely clear to you that I will not have favourites on this island. The unusual creatures you will be working with are no more important than the ordinary ones. A sick water flea needs help just as much as a mermaid. A flounder is exactly as important as a selkie. I hope you understand this because if you don’t, you’re not going to be any use doing your job.’
The children said, yes, they had understood it, but when they reached the top of the hill they were pleased they had been warned.
There were two hills, actually, with a dip in between which held a loch of dark, peaty water. On the far side of the loch was a great pile of brushwood and boulders and bracken. It looked like one of the stockades that the settlers in America used to build to protect themselves from the Indians.
But what stuck out over the top of the stockade was not an American settler. It was the head of an absolutely enormous bird.
The head was black but its beak was a bright yellow and made the children think of those great machines – crunchers or diggers or shovellers – that one sees looming over building sites. Its eyes were yellow too, huge and round and mad-looking, and as they stared they were blasted backwards by the deep honking noise they had heard on the first day.
‘What is it?’ stammered Fabio.
‘It’s a boobrie,’ said Aunt Etta, striding round the edge of the loch. ‘And I can tell you there aren’t many of those left in the world. They’re a sort of cousin of the dodo – people thought they were extinct but they weren’t. They developed on a different island and the sailors didn’t find them so they just grew and grew and grew. But then people started doing atomic tests and that kind of nonsense and the ones that were left managed to fly away.’
She led them round the other side of the stockade and they saw a short ladder propped against the side of the nest. Aunt Etta climbed up it and beckoned to the children to follow but they hung back, thinking of the huge yellow eyes, the dreadful beak.
‘Hurry up!’ said Etta and, as they still hesitated, she turned round, took a deep breath, and let them have it. ‘I have to tell you that kidnapping you was quite the most unpleasant experience any of us have had: that boarding house full of yacking women, and the London Underground with all those fumes. If you think we’d have gone to all that trouble just to let you get eaten by some bird, you need to have your heads examined. Anyway boobries are vegetarians, at least this kind are – more’s the pity.’
So the children followed her up the ladder and jumped down into the nest which was trampled flat and lined with moss and feathers.
The boobrie was not really so enormous. She was smaller than an African elephant – more the size of an Indian one. It took a lot of courage to look up at her but when they did the children stopped being afraid. She could hurt you, of course, by stepping on your feet for example, but they could see that she was a bird with serious troubles of her own.
The nest was ready for eggs but there were no eggs to be seen. The boobrie’s chest looked sadly naked so that they knew it was her own feathers she had plucked out to make a warm lining, but a lining for what? Where were the eggs and where the chicks that would follow?
‘I have to tell you that I am very worried about her,’ said Aunt Etta. ‘Being egg-bound is a most serious business.’
‘You mean her eggs are stuck inside her? She can’t get them out?’ asked Minette.
‘That’s right. And she’s too uncomfortable to go and look for something to eat.’
‘Doesn’t she have a mate to bring her food?’ asked Fabio.
Aunt Etta snorted. ‘She had but she’s lost him.’
‘You mean he’s dead?’
‘He may be, for all I know. Or he may have lost the way or forgotten all about her. You know what men are.’
This annoyed Fabio. ‘I’m a man, or I will be, and I’ll never leave my wife to starve in a nest. Never.’
‘Why did you say it’s a pity she’s a vegetarian?’ Minette wanted to know.
‘Because it makes it hard for us to feed her. We could have thrown her a frozen side of beef, but to dredge up all those sludgy sea lettuces and sea noodles and gutweeds takes hours,’ said Etta. She was stamping round the boobrie, batting her with a stick, thumping her. ‘Get up, you stupid bird. I’m trying to help you.’
At first the boobrie wouldn’t move; she sat hunched and shivering and from her throat came a single squawk which seemed to be her way of saying ‘Ow!’ But Etta was merciless. She thumped and scolded and prodded the bird till she struggled to her feet and stood there swaying and honking.
Then she climbed on to the footstool and peered into the boobrie’s back end and there, sure enough, was a glimmer of white speckled with blue.
‘You can make seventy-two omelettes from one boobrie’s egg,’ said Etta when the children had had a look.
But of course she didn’t want seventy-two omelettes – she didn’t care for omelettes anyway – she wanted living chicks. ‘The next part is going to be messy,’ she warned.
But the children stayed to help, dipping rags into the hot castor oil and handing them to her as she dabbed and swabbed at the opening.
‘We’ll just have to wait and see,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘But if this doesn’t work …’
‘Could she … die …?’ asked Minette in a quavery voice.
‘Anyone can die,’ said Etta snubbingly. ‘Including you and me.’
But before she marched the children down again she took them up the further hill, which was the highest point of the Island.
The view was incredible. To the west, miles and miles of unbroken water with the sun making a golden path between the clouds, and to the east, a long way off but with their outlines sharp and clear, two islands; one hilly, one low and long.
And on a grassy ledge overhanging the wild northern shore was an ancient burial ground, with leaning and broken gravestones covered in lichen and battered by the rain.
‘There’s supposed to be a ghost here,’ said Etta. ‘But she only turns up every hundred years or so.’
‘What sort of a ghost?’
‘A good ghost. A kind of hermit. She was called Ethelgonda and she lived on the Island and looked after the creatures.’
‘Like you,’ said Minette.
‘Not in the least like me,’ said Aunt Etta crushingly.
‘I didn’t think good people became ghosts,’ said Fabio.
‘Well, a spirit then.’
The children spent the rest of the day collecting the special seaweeds that the boobrie ate and barrowing them up to her nest. Each time they watched anxiously for a sign of an egg but nothing seemed to be happening at all.
They were getting ready for bed that night when Myrtle came upstairs excitedly, her long hair flying.
‘Come down for a minute,’ she said. ‘Herbert’s mother has come and she wants to meet you.’
She hurried them down to the rocks and there, sure enough, sitting beside Herbert was a smaller seal, a cow with the same whitish mark on her throat as her son. Herbert’s mother was old – there was something weary about the way she held her head – but she lumbered up to them, and snorted in a very welcoming way, while her son looked on proudly.
‘This is a great honour, you know,’ said Myrtle, hopping about like a young girl. ‘She doesn�
��t come out of the water often now; it tires her to be on land. Herbert will have told her about you.’
Since it is difficult to shake hands with a seal, they bowed their heads politely, and Herbert’s mother came closer and said something, speaking in a low voice and in the selkie language. The children thought she was asking them to help Herbert make up his mind about whether to be a person or a seal and, when they were back in their rooms, Fabio had an idea. ‘We could just cut him with a knife. Not hard. Just a nick – then he’d become human and that would be that.’
‘Oh, we couldn’t!’
‘I don’t see why not. Then Myrtle would have a friend. He could learn the piano and they could play duets.’
But when he thought about it, Fabio knew that Minette was right. He couldn’t make even the smallest nick in that smooth and shining skin.
It was on the next afternoon that the children had a shock. They had taken yet another load of seaweed to the boobrie and were shovelling it into the nest when the bird gave the loudest honk they had heard yet. For a moment they thought it might be an egg, for the honk was a welcoming one.
But it wasn’t. The boobrie was looking at the loch.
The children turned to follow her gaze – and gasped.
A head had appeared in the middle of the lake.
But what a head! White and smooth and enormous … like the front end of a gigantic worm. After the head came a neck … also smooth … also white … a neck divided into rings of muscle and going on and on and on. It reared and waved above the surface of the water, and still more neck appeared … and more and more. Except that the neck was getting fatter, it couldn’t all be neck – the bulgier part must be the body of the worm: a worm the size of a dozen boa constrictors.
The boobrie honked once more and the children clutched each other, unable to move.
The creature was still rising up in the water, still getting longer, still pale and glistening and utterly strange. Then it turned its head towards them and opened its eyes which were just two deep holes as black as its body was white.
