The Brides of Rollrock Island Page 12

  We upped and followed, but timidly, keeping the three leaders always in sight, but never in hearing.

  ‘How much does it cost you?’ Salmon Cawdron whispered.

  ‘No one will say,’ said Neville. ‘You must bargain with her on the price. All I know is, Jerrolt Ardler took three years gathering the money, and not a drop at Wholeman’s did he take all that time, and still he owed her more besides, after she brought up his Abigail.’

  ‘It costs you your full life and manhood, says my dad,’ said Howth Marten.

  ‘Yes, there’s lots of Rollrock men still in debt to Misskaella, with a pack of sons needing food and clothing on top of the price.’

  ‘Look at her, though!’ We knew by his tone that Salmon was not talking about the witch. ‘She is not goods, that you put a price on – a sack of flour, a box of tins.’

  ‘Oh, the price is not for her,’ said Neville. ‘The price is for Misskaella’s bother. The price is the bringing. The money is about what happens on the land, although the reward comes from the sea.’

  That night I made Mam something of a meal, bread and some cheese, a little smoked fish, and while I assembled it I told her what I’d seen, of Nicholas and his new wife and Misskaella going by. She was always quiet since Dad died, but this night as I spoke and served she spread a different silence about herself, and when I noticed the bright sound of my words ringing in the hollows of it I stopped speaking. I poured the tea and brought the cups to the table, pretending not to notice how present she was in the room, how she was more motionless than usual, fixed on me with a watchful seriousness I had not felt from her in a while.

  ‘Only I had never seen a mam straight from the sea like that,’ I heard myself apologize.

  ‘Oh, she is not a mam yet,’ said Mam. ‘At least, not on land. Though she may have pups and pups that she’s left behind, living in the water.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘Some of the stories say that, don’t they, how they are torn apart between the two kinds of children?’

  ‘Stories?’ she said. ‘If only they were but stories.’

  I sat and nudged her tea towards her; perhaps I could send her back to quietness with this reminder of all the wearisome tasks ahead of her, the lifting and sipping, the endless chewing, and all the time the absence of Dad at our elbows, the room echoing with his un-uttered remarks, his un-laughed laughs.

  But she kept her hands in her lap and only watched me. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said. ‘Rollrock is no place for me without your dad. And no place for any young man who has a choice about it. You remember your Aunty Ames, and your grandmother, that visited from Cordlin?’

  ‘A long time ago.’ I sat over the plate I had prepared myself, wanting to begin on it.

  ‘We will go and be with them, I think,’ she said. ‘I am sure they will have us.’

  I stared. Her words, each one small and sensible in itself, would not come together except to mean one thing, and that seemed outrageous, impossible to me, given the shape of our lives to this point. ‘We would go to Cordlin? You and me? And be mainlanders?’

  She smiled at how dazzled I was. ‘It will be an opportunity for you, Dominic. Perhaps you can become something other than a fisherman. Not that your dad was not quite happy on the sea, but who knows what awaits his son?’

  I pushed her teacup a little closer to her. ‘While it is hot,’ I said, to bring us both back to the present, to this meal, in case we had already dreamed more than we could ever hope for. In another part of my mind I was thinking, Of course, of course. How right it will feel, with everyone red, Mam not mismatching any more! This at least was a pleasure I could imagine; the rest was too enormous, too out of my experience, for my mind to regard with more than blank surprise and excitement.

  ‘I will write to them tonight,’ she said. ‘It can go on tomorrow’s boat. We will wait to hear from Aunty Ames before we make any plans. I’ve no reason to doubt she will take us in, but it’s best not to court disappointment.’

  She picked up her tea and took her first sip, as if the action did not weary her in the least.

  After Rollrock, Cordlin town was an enormous whirling fairground of a place, full of strangers and strange objects and animals, machines and habits. I grew up there, and up, and up, into a gawkish boy, and then I filled out and was a young man. I made my mam proud, as she lay in the last of her several illnesses, by getting myself a job at the market; I wore a white apron down to my ankles and pushed a trolley back and forth all day, loading up crates of vegetables and fruit, buckets of flowers, boxes of fish layered with ice. I was happy enough there, though part of me knew that my Potshead fellows would think little of any living not made on the sea. I had some money and some mates, and once I put on flesh and muscle I found that girls quite liked me.

  By that time I had just about forgotten the day Nick Kimes’s wife had walked past us boys on the Crescent road. No, it was the girls right here in Cordlin who had my attention, and after one or two small heartbreaks I found myself Kitty Flaming, who worked in the market office over the books, with whom I was comfortable right from our first conversation at the market employees’ picnic, and with whom I settled to regular walking-out, and dancing, and picture-shows, and the other kinds of entertainments that young couples get up to about a port town like Cordlin.

  I was very pleased to have Kitty as my sweetheart. Mam and Gran and Aunty Ames loved her, and she was a fine-looking, proud girl who knew exactly how to dress and behave for any occasion and any group of people, whether they were above or below her in station or exactly matched. She’d a straight eye and a good laugh and such energy, she fair whisked you up and carried you along with her, whatever place or project she was set on. She swept me towards the altar without ever once mentioning it; she let everyone else do the talking. ‘When are you going to marry that lovely girl?’ they said to me. ‘She’ll not wait forever, you know.’ More and more often they said it, as a year went on, and then another year.

  We strolled by the quayside, the sunshine softening towards autumn. We’d just met and parted from Jeannie Grace, who had told us of her brand-new engagement to my friend Thomas Parsnall. It’s hardly news to anyone, Jeannie had said, and yet everyone seems surprised, and takes pleasure in it, and looks at you properly, as if they had never seen you before.

  Now I said to Kitty, ‘People say we should be married, you and I.’

  ‘To each other, you mean?’ she said with a wicked smile.

  ‘Of course to each other.’

  ‘Hm,’ she said. ‘Which people are these, who say this?’

  ‘Let me see – Aunty Ames, Tom Geoghan and Mister Bryce at work. Windy Nuttall, your uncle Crowther. Everyone.’

  ‘Really. How funny of them. I dare say marriage is not on your mind at all. I hope you tell them fair and square what to do with their opinions?’ Her face was raised to meet the breeze, a look on it as if she never wanted to do more than enjoy that freshness on her skin.

  I was full of doubt, in an instant. I walked along beside her, listening to her words again in my head. ‘Do you not want to marry me, then?’ I said eventually.

  ‘Who’s asking me?’ she said, pretending astonishment. ‘Isn’t it up to you and those people to decide?’

  I took her hand and walked close beside her. ‘Come, Kitty, don’t fool with me now. Will you marry me or no?’

  She shrugged, looked away towards the Heads. ‘I probably will,’ drifted back over her shoulder. I was about to throw away her hand and stamp off, when, ‘Don’t you think?’ she added. And she turned and looked at me, sweet and sly, and into her kiss, a quick one because we were in public, she put all that she was not admitting in her words: surprise and excitement and a little terror.

  We walked on, and everything was different, just as Jeannie had said – outlined in gold, things were, in the late sunshine, funnel- and mast-shadows crisply black on the sunlit storehouse walls. Every gull flew in a more purposeful arc, or arranged its folded wings more
importantly; every stone and plank went towards making a different stage of life from the one that had passed on from us, moments before. ‘This is the day you tell your grandchildren about,’ I said, and Kitty squeezed my hand.

  We reached Cobalt’s store and turned back. ‘One thing,’ Kitty said. Again she looked away from me. Between the Heads, the clouds hung puffy, gleamed golden. ‘Your house on Rollrock.’

  ‘You want to live on Rollrock?’

  ‘I most certainly do not,’ she said. ‘I want you to rid yourself of that house. It gives me the shudders just to think of it there.’

  ‘Why, ever? I’ve not been back in years!’

  ‘Still, the house is there, and it’s a place for you, among those men and their … what they’ve married. I never want to go there, and I never want you to think that you can go. Go back, you know, and belong.’

  ‘I’ve never for a minute!’

  ‘I know you’ve not,’ she said a little gentler. ‘But that’s not to say you never would, while you had that house. Will you sell it, please, Dominic? To settle my mind?’

  ‘Why on earth would you be afraid—’

  But she was afraid. She was not sweet and sly now; she was all grave attention to me. ‘It’s the one thing I worry about with you, your connection to that place. Will you sever it, for me? For our sons, should we have any?’

  I saw then how far she had taken this in her mind, while outwardly she had seemed carefree, accepting of everything about me. I saw, in her thoughtful, firmly held face, that she was prepared to forgo me, if I chose not to do as she asked, it mattered so much to her.

  I took both her hands. ‘Gladly,’ I said. ‘It means nothing to me, that mad isle. I’ll sell the house tomorrow, and buy you a ring with the money.’

  She examined my eyes, saw how serious I was behind my smile, and smiled back with relief.

  Well, it turned out not to be so straightforward, of course. No one in Cordlin wanted a Rollrock house. Men laughed, and women looked at me sideways at the very suggestion.

  ‘Twenty years ago, maybe,’ said Aunty Ames, ‘you might have sold it. But no one wants to take their family there while all the wives are those sea-madams.’

  ‘I should say,’ said my employer Mister Bryce, ‘that your only hope would be to go to the isle yourself, and see if there is any young man about to make a marriage, who could use it.’

  ‘I could write to Fisher, I suppose,’ I said to Kitty, ‘and have him ask about.’

  ‘Yes, do that,’ she said, and moved on to talking of the arrangements for our betrothal supper.

  I sat to write that letter with hardly a thought, and I wrote swiftly, laying out my greetings to Neepny Fisher, who I’d heard had taken over the store from his father Jodrell, and to his wife and family, and moving briskly on to frame my request. It was only as I watched the words ‘and all its contents’ fall out of my pen onto the page that I felt a tremor of doubt. I sat there and stared at them awhile, and then I wrote on, to the end of the page and the end of the matter.

  I put the letter in the post next day, and when I had finished work I went by the market’s office. ‘Wife-to-be?’ I said in the door.

  Kitty looked up from her calculations and smiled with happy surprise, and blushed a little.

  ‘A quick word?’ I said. ‘I’ll not disturb you long.’

  She pulled up another chair for me to perch on near to her.

  ‘I have sent the letter to Fisher.’

  The happiness vanished from her face, and she was all business. ‘Good. How soon will you hear back, do you think?’

  ‘Maybe Tuesday night’s boat? I’m not sure. Neepny may not be as ready to do a favour as his dad was. But I wanted to ask you. There are two chairs in that house, armchairs, my mam’s and my dad’s. I remember we covered them with sheets as we left. It’s not that they are valuable, and they’re probably not improved from years of sitting there unused, through winters and summers.’

  ‘Can you have Fisher send them, perhaps? Crate them up and put them on the boat?’

  ‘I thought of that. And then I thought, what a clumsy lad Neepny used to be, and a grubby one, and would I want him manhandling them? And I thought, perhaps I should look the place over – the old house – for anything else we could use in our married life? And also, my dad’s grave has gone untended all these years. I should like to visit, I think, just to tie off these ends in my mind, do you see? Also, if I go and look Neepny in the eye, he may take better care on the sale, in getting me my price. I would only go a day or two, and then I would be finished with the place forever. And we would have those armchairs, brought across carefully. I don’t even know if we could use them, but to have them in our home, Mam’s and Dad’s side by side … I think I would like that.’

  I had bent farther and farther forward in my seat, so that now I must look up to see Kitty’s face. She regarded me most soberly awhile. ‘Two days,’ she said. ‘Two chairs. Yes,’ she said. ‘It is nice to have some keepsakes.’ She examined her lap, turning the folds of her skirt there and smoothing them. She looked up; she nodded. I loved her in that moment. I saw how easily our married life would run, how agreeably. ‘When would you go?’

  ‘Wednesday morning is the next boat. Mister Bryce would give me the time off, I’m sure. It is his suggestion, this arrangement, after all.’

  ‘Saturday is our supper. Can you be done and back by then?’

  ‘Oh, I should wait until next week, then, so as to help you here with the supper!’

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Get it over and done.’ And she flashed me a cautious smile.

  On Tuesday at the market I bought some mainland flowers to put on Dad’s grave, kinds never seen on Rollrock, I was sure; they would have bemused him, but that was partly the point of them, to show him how far I had moved on from the isle, from our little lives there.

  On Wednesday morning, I and my flowers boarded the Fleet Fey, and I sat before the wheelhouse as we chugged across the harbour, and out between the Heads top-gilded by the rising sun. As the land fell away behind, the breadth and depth and mystery of the ocean struck me as it had not for a long while, and the tininess upon it of people, and people’s crafts. The waters heaved and rolled and sank beneath me, and I remembered how, when small, I had regarded the sea as a single vast beast, many of its moods and intentions hostile towards us on our little island, or in our little boats.

  I remembered our boat-ride, Mam’s and mine, from Rollrock to Cordlin, as a great sea-voyage, at least a day long, so it surprised, even alarmed me how soon the island rose from the sea, how quickly Potshead spotted and sprouted on the slopes, and then grew thick in the cleft of them as we rocked around the western headlands. I hardly felt ready. But what was I afraid of? I was a Cordlin man now. I would transact the business of my house and the chairs and then be gone again.

  The town seemed smaller and poorer than I remembered it, more beaten into the hill by the weather. Clancy Curse detached himself from Fisher’s wall with exactly the same idle-seeming movements as I remembered from my childhood, and caught the ropes and wound them about the bollards in the old familiar way. He was quite a small man – they were all shortish, the men who met the boat, though I remembered them as giants, their heads among the clouds, full of wisdom and weather and long-gotten experience. But no, they were little nuggety fellows, and some of them bow-legged, their skin gone to leather from years of wind and cold aboard the boats.

  ‘Is that you, Dominic?’ one of them said. It was Shy Tyler, my own age but crease-faced from work and weather. He smiled and shook my hand heartily. ‘What brings you back?’ He eyed my flowers. ‘Have you come a-wooing?’

  ‘These are for my dad,’ I said. The strange bright things shook in their cone of newspaper.

  ‘Of course they are. And you’ll see to the selling of the house while you’re here?’

  ‘Why, yes! You know of that already?’

  He grinned. ‘You want to keep things secret, you don’t
tell Neepny Fisher. No, we’ve several young fellows squabbling over your place, don’t you worry. You’ll want to catch up with Neepny now, I dare say?’

  ‘I might visit Dad first, and see the house for myself, before I talk to Neepny.’

  ‘You’ll stay over? Come and have supper with me tonight. I’ve a wife and son now: Fametta, loveliest ever to step out of the waves, and little James, spit image of my old dad.’

  I suppressed a shiver on Kitty’s behalf. I knew what I should answer.

  ‘Are you married yourself, Dominic?’

  ‘Nearly.’

  ‘Oh it’s grand being a married man.’ Shy slapped my arm. ‘And having a boy, there’s nothing like it.’

  ‘I’d be very happy to meet him,’ I said. What harm could it do, congratulating a man on his son? And I might hear some stories to take back to Kitty, to make her laugh, and marvel at island life.

  I went up through the town. Everything was so much as I remembered, and yet so much littler, that I was charmed and horrified both. Kitty would certainly hate it here, how cramped it was, how quiet, how empty of bustle. And she would see as odd, rather than as pleasing in their familiarity, the sea-wives’ touches on the houses. Stones and shells and tiny dried-weed baskets, useless for anything but decoration, lay arranged on many windowsills. The curtains the wives favoured were swept aside one way; a Cordliner would laugh at those, how the houses seemed to be looking slyly sideways. Cats stalked about everywhere, or lay curled on steps or fence-tops or in windows, patched strange colours from their interbreeding. And little gardens grew in pots and sheltered corners, crammed with the plants that the seal-women liked, which were not airy and flowery like mainland potted plants, but brought to mind coral, or oyster-clumps, or other kinds of sea growth.

  The church was a relief, absent of any of these unsettling details. My father’s grave, instead of the raw wound in the turf that Mam and I had left those years ago, was now the gentlest-grassed mound, and the headstone was speckled and patched with lichen. I took my flowers from their wrapping and laid them at the foot of the stone; the breeze buffeted their fragile heads, and their colours and shapes were just as odd and overly bright for this green-and-grey place as I could have wished. I crouched beside the mound, never one for praying and unable to speak to a Dad transformed into mound and stone. The wind wagged the cypress trees at the graveyard gate, and a blackbird happened by, as neat as the Cordlin undertaker, but with a curious eye, a bright beak and a cheerful spring in his step.