The Silver Dark Sea

Emmeline leaves, and as she goes she feels, too, the swell of anger – as if someone, somewhere, is laughing. As if a trick has been played.

* * *

Who else? Who else cannot know what to think or say? They are all like fish on land now – blank-eyed, open-mouthed.

What a day … Ed Lovegrove stands with his hands in his pockets; he looks out to sea. Boy oh boy, what a day … Eighteen years as a harbourmaster, thirty-nine years as a harbourmaster’s son before that, and Edward can’t remember a man being washed ashore like this. Bodies, yes. He’s had his deaths to deal with – Jack’s, a birdspotter’s, that man from Utta who caught his foot in the line as he was throwing out pots so that they found his boat going round and round and when they hauled in the line he was already half-plucked at by fish. Ed fears the watery deaths. It is the watery deaths that he feels he can prevent by watching the weather, noting down each boat that docks here, keeping an eye on the weather station that lives at the back of his house. He has a rain gauge; there is a small anemometer to measure wind speed and wind direction. He tends to it, like a man at prayer.

But a person who has appeared? That the sea has given?

Tabitha rang earlier. She’d given the details – the beard, the injured hands – and Ed had not known the words or the way forwards. He’d said it isn’t a death, is it? So …? A man washed ashore is the stuff of books; it is not what happens in the twenty-first century to an island that relies on tourism and migrant birds and the sinking price of lamb. An island with a coloured line of jetsam – plastics, netting, nylon rope – on every beach like a scar.

We wait until he wakes. We do nothing till he’s woken.

I should call the coastguard in case …

OK, said Tabitha. But not the police. Not yet.

Fine. Not yet, Ed agreed. The police, he knows, would bring trouble of their own.

So Ed had settled in the office of the harbourmaster’s house and made the call. Mac had answered. He was eating something. With a half-full mouth he’d said, really? Jesus. Need an air ambulance?

Tab says not. Any boats down?

There had been the distant click of computer keys, and when the clicking stopped he’d heard Mac swallow, clear his throat. Nope, no boats, Ed. Well, there was a dinghy capsized about twenty miles north of you, but both men were picked up. He’s not one of yours? A guest, or some such?

I’m sure he is. Just checking, you know.

Or some half-fish creature? A part-whale? Haven’t you guys got a tale about that sort of thing? A hard, single laugh.

Mac – who Ed has never warmed to. Thanks, he’d said, hung up.

* * *

The day fades. The sky pinkens.

It is low tide. The beaches are glassy. The wading birds are reflected in the sand and sometimes they make their short, skimming flight to a different stretch of sand and land with their legs stretched out.

Curlews. Nathan hears them.

He turns off the engine but he sits, for a while. He stares at the steering wheel. Nathan has no thoughts at this moment: he is empty, worn-out.

Kitty watches him. She wears a floral apron, and as she’d been picking bits of eggshell out of a bowl of yolks she’d heard his car, looked up.

Her husband is staring at something – the dashboard?

Then he climbs out. The car door shuts and there is the crunch of the gravel, and from an upstairs bed the cat jumps down with a muffled thud as Nathan comes into the hallway, kicks off his boots.

She wipes her hands, goes to him. He tastes of salt. So?

They sit at the kitchen table, facing each other. His wife has a sweep of navy-blue powder on her eyelids, and Nathan sees that some of this powder is also on her cheekbones as if it has dusted down through the course of the day. She smells as she always does – lotion, Miss Dior, a touch of turpentine. Kitty Bundy. At first, she’d called it a dancing name.

Mum went straight to Lowfield. I told her it wasn’t Tom but she still went.

Of course she did – softly said.

Seven years of marriage but the word wife can still feel new to him. This woman – rich-haired, curved, slow in her movements – leans forwards, over her glass. She looks down into it, holds it by the stem and swirls the wine very carefully. Her hair comes down as she does this. She has not aged – not even slightly. She looks as she did when he first met her, when she turned around in a scarlet dress.

And Maggie? Did you go to see her?

I did. He sighs, rubs his eyes.

How did she take it?

It’s been a long day, Kit – which is his way of asking for silence, now.

She leans back. She takes her hair and gathers it, holding it on the top of her head with both hands, and for a moment Nathan can see her white neck, the tiny tattoo of a bird at the nape. Well. Mine was long too. I’ve worked all day – ten hours of it. Do you want to hear about it? She waits.

Nathan says nothing.

Kitty lets go of her hair, pushes her chair back. The bird on her neck goes away.

Maggie was calm – Kitty is certain of this. Maggie, who is too neat and reserved and dignified to wail in company, or throw things at the wall. Small-boned and gentle. And she is contained, in the way cupped water is – full of reflections and moments but they pass too quickly for Kitty to read them clearly. As Kitty rinses the plates of omelette, she can see Maggie perfectly – how she’d waded out from Lock-and-Key beach on the night that Tom died. Her pink shirt had darkened as the water reached her waist, and she’d called out Tom? Tom?

Vulnerable, and lonely. Kind. Old-souled.

And she is on her own, of course. No family in the world. Having Sam Lovegrove watching your house at night is not proper company. They all try to see more of her, but she hides herself away.

It is not how Kitty would grieve. She, if she had to, would grieve wildly – with noise, mucus, paint on the canvas, blustery walks on beaches, curse words and exhausted sleep. But everyone grieves differently just as everyone loves in different ways. Emmeline is resentful; Nathan has retreated or almost, and he still drinks on his own at night. The crate that she leaves in the lane for recycling is always clinking, and full.

Their cat – tabby, overweight – butts her head against her shins.

Kitty leans down to stroke her, and as she does this she wonders how you can grieve a death if you have no bones, if you have nothing to bury or go back to. Poor Maggie. Poor thing.

When she turns to speak to her husband again, she finds his chair is empty. He’s gone away soundlessly, so that Kitty drops the tea-towel onto the worktop and stares where he had been.

* * *

And so the bedside lights go on, one by one.

The television’s bluish glow flits in island sitting rooms. Curtains are pulled into the middle, and closed. In a bedroom of Wind Rising, a girl with bitten fingernails holds her mobile phone. She sits cross-legged on her bed, and types sounds like a hard day. Hope you are OK. Does she put one x, after this, or several? Leah chooses one, and presses send. The words fly. Sending. Then, Sent.

Beneath the lighthouse, in the old lighthouse-keepers’ quarters, Rona Lovegrove bends down. She peers through the glass door of her oven, watches her sponge cake rise. She has heard this man looks like Tom. She thinks of the Bundys, and thinks of love.

Jim Coyle lies in bed. He lies in his own darkness. He tries to imagine the lighthouse’s slow flash. Jim – like the Brights – was born in the lighthouse-keepers’ quarters; unlike the Brights, he became the lighthouse-keeper himself, in time – and he misses so much about it. The drowsy tick of cogs in the lantern room. The sweet smell of paraffin. Sticky, blackish knuckles from polishing the brass.

He is blind now. But Jim still knows each crack in the plaster, each decorative curl on the wrought-iron fireplace where he used to toast crumpets, each speckle of paint that made it onto windowpanes. There was a loose brick in the boiler room which he kept his penny whistle behind. Is it still there? Might it still play the same tune, if he blew?

Beside him, his wife reads. He can hear the pages as she turns them, how their bottom edges catch the bedspread to make a dragging sound. He asks what book is it?