The Brides of Rollrock Island Page 13

  I crossed the town to our old house. I turned the key, remembering it in Mam’s hand as she locked up the day we left, and I pushed open the door. Look, I must duck my head now, just like Dad, to avoid the lintel!

  Inside, the air was so dead and yet so a-swarm with memories that my knees almost gave way. I wished, momentarily, that Kitty had come; if I had had to show and explain all this to her – this town, Dad’s grave, this house – it would never have affected me so strongly. As it was, the house embraced me, immediately and completely. Cordlin, it seemed to say, had been only a distraction, all noise and colour and rushing people. Cordlin had beguiled me and built extra layers of talk and work, money and society onto me, that were now stripped away. Here on Rollrock was the stillness I remembered from before, the small silence of the house within the quiet of the small town within the vast airy wordless limitlessness of weather and water. At heart, I was not a Cordlin man, betrothed and businesslike; I was a carefree boy following my fancies around Rollrock’s lanes and field walls, too young to realize that anything was amiss.

  I left the front door open. I opened all the windows. The same ones stuck as had always stuck, and I knew just where to apply the force to lift and lower them. At the back, I opened the door to the yard – the grass had grown high out there, and then been beaten down by rain or wind. The air drawn through the house by my opening it up felt like the first deep breath I had taken since Dad died and we left the island. I closed my eyes. The distant sea-sound only made the quietness quieter.

  The small rooms echoed unfamiliarly without their rugs. Back in the front room, I pulled the sheeting off my father’s armchair. How small it was, how modest, when once I had thought it a throne, and had had to spring from the floor to board it! Now I lowered myself to sit there, and the dead fireplace sat with me, and my mother’s chair dreamed beside me under its own dust-sheet.

  It’s not that they are valuable, I heard myself saying to Kitty, of these two pieces of my innermost soul. Look what I had become: a chattering busy townsman with a childhood I only laughed about, and encouraged others to find amusing, this backward isle I had come from, these unworldly folk! My dad had loved it here; my mam had loved the place along with the man; I had lived my first twelve years here, and the island’s cobbles and wall-flints had left their imprints on me, its hills and dales, its moles and beaches, and the peaks and hollows of the sea all around. Now in the silence, the armchair’s wings dampening even the sound of the sea, the voices came back to me, woken by Shy’s accent down at the quayside. Dad and Mam sighed and admonished and laughed, and the bright chipper cries of my playfellows cut through the different airs of crisp winter mornings, and blowsy summer afternoons. And I was glad Kitty hadn’t come, for if she had, I would not have heard those voices; I would have gone on not knowing who I truly was, and the place I truly came from.

  I stood up out of my father’s chair and left the house, closing but not locking the door behind me. I climbed the hill slowly, taking in everything, remembering everything, reawakening to the childhood I carried within me, but had long denied.

  I reached the highest house, the witch’s mansion. There the grass was grown up and beaten down just as at home. The windows were closed and curtained, and many of the curtains were pressed to the glass in square-cornered shapes of furniture, as if someone in their madness or terror had piled up the house’s contents to keep some force from breaking in. The garden, that I remembered as so neatly laid out and kept trim, was now a thicket, trees and shrubs burst well beyond their borders, clotted with fallen flowers and ornamental fruit, and underclothed with weeds.

  A man climbed into the street, walked along it towards me. It was Emmett Marshall, dad of Risby Marshall that had been my pal in school; Risby and I had saved each other from many a beating by the bigger boys.

  ‘Well, if it’s not wee Dominic Mallett!’ said Emmett. He laughed and stuck out his hand to me. His teeth were longer than I remembered, and his hair was entirely white. ‘How are you, my boy?’

  ‘I’m well, Mister Marshall. Just across from Cordlin a little while, to visit my Dad and do some business on the house.’

  ‘You want Misskaella?’

  ‘Oh, no. I only happened up this way. She’s passed on, I take it?’

  He looked puzzled, then laughed. ‘Why, no, she’s in as fine a fettle as ever she was, the old gooney,’ he laughed. ‘Only she’s not lived here since a good year now.’ We looked up at the ivied walls, the furniture pressing at the windows. ‘Filled it to the rafters with treasures, she did, brought from the mainland – furnitures and pictures and a kitchen of pans, a great oven never been lit. No more room in there for her own self! She lives down Shore Cottage now.’

  ‘What, the old boat on the beach, below McComber’s place?’

  ‘Oh, she has made it good, a neat little bothy sodded over the top. Spread it round with her rubbish, mind – she cannot seem to stop with the collecting, wherever she resides – but she’s comfortable enough. Comfortabler than she ever was here; this conjured the worst in her. There-awhile she was bringing foods across, none of us had heard of them. Fish-eggs from Russia, some terrible vegetable from Siam that she could not eat; she put it on her rubbish-pile, and the seeds took, and it ran all over her back field. Down in the bothy she is calmer, and now that her sisters are died – though that last one visited but once a year from Cordlin – she has less reason for that show-offery, that throwing of money at silliness. It sits now, her wealth; she still asks it of a man, to bring up his wife, but she cares less about spending it.’

  I looked at my feet, shook my head. ‘I used to be so afraid of her, when I was tiny.’

  ‘Oh, you want always to be wary of a woman like that, lad. However high you grow.’ Marshall gripped my shoulder. ‘Are you coming back to us, then, Dominic?’ he said warmly. ‘Have you finished your mainland wanderings?’

  ‘No, no, Mister Marshall,’ I said. ‘Matter of fact, I’m about to be married there, to a Cordlin girl. I am just sorting out the house here and I shall be off for good, I should think.’

  He twinkled on at me a while, and then he took and released a big sigh. ‘Well, congratulations on your marriage, lad. And it’s grand to see you, and see you so tall and well, after all this time. You’re always welcome here, you know that, don’t you? Whether you have a house here or no.’

  ‘I do, and thank you, Mister Marshall.’

  He walked off along the street towards his house, and after a last look at Misskaella’s imprisoned furniture I gave myself a shake and went the other way. At a brisk pace I strode up the path beyond Watch-Out Hill, to the windiest place on the Spine, to the wildest, out of the sight of any Potsheader. My hair blew sideways and my coat beat hard at my knees, and the delicate wonderings that had afflicted me in my parents’ house were wind-washed out of my head, and my conversation with Emmett Marshall too; I was stupid with cold and with rushing air, and my only thought was what was I doing here in such discomfort, when I had so much business to attend to back in the town?

  I filled the rest of the day in conferring with Neepny Fisher, which entailed as well a great deal of greeting, and repeating my situation to, the customers of his shop who interrupted us. In sum, as Shy had said, there were several likely customers for the house; Fisher himself was interested in it as somewhere to place his father, who was growing too cantankerous to have around the store.

  I extracted myself midafternoon with Neepny’s boy Juniper, who helped me carry the armloads of wood I would need to build crates for the armchairs. He was a good lad, sweet-natured and eager to help, and although I was well past wanting company I was glad of him, for without him I never would have got those crates so far along before I was due down at Shy’s. He looked like Neepny entirely with his red hair and freckles, but his manner was quite different from boys his age I had observed in Cordlin, much quieter and more attentive to his surroundings. As he fetched and carried for me, I heard Shy again: Having a boy, there’s noth
ing like it, and I could see myself as father to a boy like Juniper; it was not too much of a stretch. It was really the first time I had thought about fathering. I had taken for granted that I would have children, and would have them with Kitty – that was what marrying was for, mostly, wasn’t it? – but I had never pictured such times as this, working at some practical task with a small, interested person at my side, perfectly trusting of me and eager to help in any way he could.

  Juniper’s mam I had barely glimpsed down at Fisher’s, barely heard say more than ‘Nice to meet you, Dominic Mallett,’ the way they do, using your full name, and low-pitched, as if they have secrets with you. One or two other wives I had passed in the street, and once I had heard a snatch of singing from inside one of the houses that had pulled me up short, flooding my head with childhood and sea-mystery. But when I went to Shy’s that night for supper, I properly met his wife Fametta, and their son James was of an age where a visitor is some kind of grand new toy, nothing to be afraid of, and if I were not to be rude I must spend quite a deal of time gazing into one face or another. And very odd I found that, coming from plain unmagical Cordlin as I did, and used now to seeing faces that were put together of pallor and freckles as mine was, and framed with red curls. And though I tried to keep Kitty’s revulsion in mind as the correct way of regarding these two people, in fact I found them pleasant. Quite apart from the beauty of Fametta’s face and figure, and the simple but ingenious way she had fixed up her hair, her smile and quietude calmed and charmed me. In little James’s face were blended both of his parents’, his pale eyes from Shy, his clear skin and silky hair, hardly more than black down yet, from Fametta. He pulled himself up to standing at my knees, and he burbled smilingly up at me, and his parents took great delight in every sight and sound of him.

  And Shy talked, impelled by the joy he had found in the married state and in fatherhood. He reminded me of things we had seen together, and done, and heard of in our youth. I was surprised to remember times I had forgotten, or to find that I remembered them differently from Shy, and must quarrel amiably with him about the true events. The beautiful woman cooed to the charming child nearby, and knowing that just such lovelies ruled each home and hearth around me, up and down the town, I began to think that Potshead life was perhaps not so small as I had once thought it, and not so unnatural as Cordlin people feared. It is all so familiar, I thought towards Kitty, who sat warily in my mind all evening, noticing everything and disapproving of most of it. What is to be frightened of, in this woman, this child? You only hate them because you do not know them; you have not seen their harmlessness.

  ‘So there is no hope of you returning?’ said Shy on his doorstep as my visit ended.

  ‘No, my wife will want to stay in Cordlin,’ I said. ‘And she will have no work, being married, so we will need the money from the house, towards a Cordlin house for ourselves.’ I thrust my hands into my coat pockets, and we both of us looked everywhere but at each other in the dimness.

  ‘Goodbye, Dominic Mallett,’ said Fametta. Baby James was a sleeping bundle at her shoulder. Her face floated like a beautiful mask in the night, her lips full shadows, her eyes dark pools, each with a moon-gleam on the surface.

  ‘Goodbye, Fametta,’ I said. ‘It was lovely to meet you.’

  I set off home, but the clap of the cold sea air had woken me, and at the end of their street, as I heard Shy’s door close behind me, instead of turning uphill I turned down. I walked easily through those lower lanes, confident that I would not meet anybody at this hour and glad of the peace of that. Down to the sea-front I went, and along it north past the mole-end, and on to where the paving ended and there was the choice whether to struggle up through the dunes to the Crescent road or to slither down to the firmer sand of the beach. Down I went, and set out along the silvered sand past the ripples that broke the moonlight into pieces, and the wider waves that curled over and crushed the pieces to blackness.

  It was a fine feeling to walk fast and breathe deeply, to leave Potshead and people behind me – and more-than-people, or less, or whatever the sea-wives were. I rescued Kitty from the place deep in my mind to which Fametta and James had banished her. Look, there is all this of me, too! I exclaimed to her. And perhaps it is unusual, but is it quite despicable? I wished dearly that she were here beside me so that I could talk to her, because in truth she had faded a little, as had Cordlin and its excitements and stimulations, cleared from my mind by Rollrock’s simplicity, its straightness and its strangeness, as the tide smoothes the day’s footprints and drag-marks from a beach.

  ‘Hoy!’

  I thought I had misheard the sea as a voice, and I looked out that way, in case there should be a person there, requiring saving.

  But ‘Hoy!’ sounded again behind me, and I spun, and there, lit starkly by the moonlight, sat two things that brought my heart jumping into my throat. Thrippence’s bothy, a furry black mound high among the dunes, sent smoke slanting from some invisible chimney. And on the steps from bothy to beach sat a shadow-mound smaller in size but mightily more fearsome than the bothy: the witch Misskaella, waving an arm to summon me.

  I glanced back along the beach, searched the shadows of the Forward cliff ahead, but no one walked nearby who might be summoned to help me, or even to share this dread. Slowly I paced up the hard wet sand and into the softer, wishing it were more soft and difficult so that I might never reach Misskaella. What could she want of me? Why did I not have the strength to walk away, along the beach, ignoring her? Come now, I told myself, what harm can she mean you, an old woman, sleepless in the midnight? She is probably only in need of some company, and curious about this passing stranger.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said as I neared her.

  She watched me glinting-eyed. Her dark rags looked as if they had grown out of her rather than being created from cloth and put on. Her face – the face of my childhood nightmares – turned up at me as I drew closer, the moon unkind upon every whisker and wrinkle and mole.

  ‘Misskaella,’ I said, to show that I knew her, that I had the measure of her. She stared up at me, clearly feeling no compulsion to speak.

  ‘My name is Dominic Mallett,’ I said. ‘I come from Cordlin.’

  ‘Mallett? You come from Potshead. You cannot fool me; I remember your father. How he looked down on everyone!’ She made a horrid noise in her throat, and spat the hawkings off to one side. She reached into the neck of her garment, and worked or scratched at something on her shoulder. ‘What are you back for, to sneer at us some more? Oh, your little round mam, I remember her too, so lonely and so pure. You think yourself pure as well, I have no doubt?’

  ‘Of course not. What do you mean?’ I knew very well what she meant, and I was cross with her for having seen me so clearly. ‘I am here on business, to make some arrangements, about property.’

  ‘About property,’ she said in exactly my affronted tone, and grinned up at me, showing the terrible state of her teeth.

  ‘Yes, I am selling my house.’

  ‘Are you now, my love?’ She shrugged and tweaked at her upper garments as if dislodging fleas, or preparing a moment of madness when she might fling off all her clothes and stand naked and appalling before me. ‘Cutting your ties?’ she crooned up at me. ‘Hoping to escape us forever?’

  ‘I’m sure there’s no ill-will in it, Misskaella,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure not!’ she said sweetly. ‘Such a nice young man, with his mainland manners. Have you anything for me, Dominic Mallett?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘ “I’m sorry?” Look at him. People bring me gifts. People leave me offerings. Sometimes it is a nice fish that they catch, or a loaf their wives have made. A blanket for the winter? A leg of a lamb for my supper? People here,’ she said, ‘respect a woman like me and know how to keep her good-tempered.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I was only walking by, taking the air. I didn’t have it in mind to visit you; if I had thought about it I would have guess
ed you were asleep.’

  ‘Oh, they bring their gifts while I sleep, just the same,’ she said. ‘That is no obstacle. How is your sainted mother?’

  ‘My mother died, several years ago.’

  ‘Ah, ah …’ Even she would not make merry with a mother’s death. ‘These things happen. So. You are wanting for companionship.’

  ‘Of my mother, yes. But I have friends, and an aunt.’

  ‘Friends, and an aunt.’ How foolish she made my words sound. ‘There are some things that friends and an aunt cannot provide you, as I’m sure you know.’

  ‘I am to be married very soon,’ I said, perhaps too hurriedly.

  She laughed. ‘Oh, I see you understand me. She is all red hair and sharp words, your betrothed?’

  ‘Not sharp at all,’ I protested, though in truth, by contrast with Fametta … ‘She is a fine girl, and kindly too.’

  ‘Kindly.’ Misskaella pushed out her mouth, as if kindliness were a very suspect virtue. ‘And you’ve tested the limits of her kindliness, have you?’

  ‘Why should I do that?’

  She straightened and looked at the sea beyond me. ‘Oh, I don’t know. It is useful to have the measure of these things, don’t you think?’

  I wished I could run away from her; I did not like the way she pulled my words apart and laughed at me through the shreds.

  ‘Let us try an experiment, shall we? Help me up.’ She took up the stick beside her and put out her hand, a filthy claw, beyond which she was such a mass of flesh and cloth that I felt sure I could not lift her.