The Silver Dark Sea

What?

This man from Sye. What does he look like?

She waits. Constance waits for the answer, and the longer she waits, the more she thinks I know what he looks like. She can guess.

Dark, he says, casually.

Skinned?

No – dark-haired. His skin’s pale.

Not old, then?

Late thirties, maybe. Early forties. Hard to tell.

Beard?

He looks up. Constance. It is his warning voice.

She meets his stare. She holds her gaze until he looks away. Perhaps what surprises her is not that she was bold enough to marry, but bold enough to marry him – Ian, whose temper was as known as the Anne-Rosa is. And like the Anne-Rosa, it was mistrusted and whispered of and could rise out of the darkness, slick with hanging weed. She’d been told of it. But Constance was never afraid. Once, just once, in their early days of marriage they had argued about the farm – what had it been? A broken machine? A sheepdog that was not learning? She cannot recall it now and perhaps it does not matter. But Ian had struck the wall. He’d given a single roar and slammed his fist against it so that the wall shook. That had silenced them both – from loud voices to a sudden, incredible hush in which Constance could hear the dust settling onto the floor. Hands on her knees, she examined the plasterwork – broken, powdering. Then she pulled on her shoes and, without a word, she walked down the lane towards the harbour – meaning, absolutely, to catch the ferry and make her way back to the mainland, to the town she grew up in and still missed sometimes. Ian followed, pleading. I’m so sorry … Stay. It never happened twice. On that quayside, Constance turned to her husband and vowed – swore with gritted teeth and her hand to her chest – that she would leave him for good if he ever struck another thing. Anything, Ian – the wall, the dog, a pillow, her. I promise.Do you understand me? Yes, he understood her; Constance always keeps her word. And he has shouted since, and he’s slammed doors, and once, having argued with Nathan, he kicked the rainwater barrel with such power that it ruptured and the rush of water sent the chickens running in the way that chickens do – as if the world is ending. Ian can curse like no-one else she knows. And it is blunt, unimaginative swearing so that she winces. But that’s all he’s done, in twenty-four years. It is all he’ll ever do.

Constance drinks her orange juice.

There is the drip of the kitchen tap.

Someone needs to tell Emmeline, she says, and pads out of the room.

It is the peonies she loves. She has always been told that the island’s weather and its salt and thin soil would not suit them, that peonies could not grow on Parla. But she has grown them. She has tended them, and hoped, and here they are now. They grow in a cluster, facing south. Their pinkness makes her heart fill up, each time. When she walks back along the lane towards Easterly she sees them, and smiles – and it is like coming home to a person, she thinks. It is like being greeted. It is like a hello.

Emmeline kneels beside them. She holds a watering can and wears her sheepskin slippers. Beautiful, she tells them. You are doing very well.

It is one of the small benefits of living on her own: she can grow the flowers she has always longed to. Thirty years ago, any flowers she tried for were crushed by footballs and children’s feet; fifteen years ago, she would have looked out of the window on a Sunday as she cooked the roast dinner for Jack and wished that she could be out in the flowerbeds with a trowel and a bag of manure, rather than sieving the gravy. She called it a woman’s lot, back then. People matter more than flowers, of course. But now she has the time – at last. Foxgloves and hydrangeas. And she loves her peonies.

Emmeline stands, looks out to sea. The unending sea. She grew up in the lighthouse. Her, her parents and Tabitha had lived in one of the three houses at the lighthouse’s base, so that the sea was so close and so loud that it felt like a fifth person – a family member who was never far away. Her earliest memory is being shown the pots of paraffin whilst licking the butter off a currant bun; her second earliest is polishing the lens. And she had loved her lighthouse life. She’d loved winding the weights back up to the top of the stairs, and learning Morse code, and she had loved the view so much that she’d dreamed of keeping the light herself one day. Emmeline Bright – with her own jacket and hat. But lighthouse-keeping was never seen as woman’s work. When she married Jack Bundy at eighteen, she left the lantern behind her. She moved south and inland, into the farm called Wind Rising. From light and high seas to a dark-roomed house; from saltwater to sheep. Only half a mile from one life to the other, but those had been such different lives. And how many years had she walked through the creaking rooms of Wind Rising, with its missing roof tiles and open fire which threw smoke into the sitting room when the wind shifted itself? Long enough. Those years of smelling of sheep, of wedging paper under the uneven legs of chairs. All four children were born in that house, or near it. All of them were late to show their faces except Tom – of course. Tom leapt out early, as if too excited to wait.

She pushes fertiliser into the earth. Easterly – like all names on Parla, its name is forthright, brusque. It is simple – as if we are all fools and need to be told plainly. She, Jack and their youngest child moved here when it became free. A man called Strutt – a mainlander, sullen, bad teeth and bad manners – had died during those wild winter storms of nearly thirty years ago, and Emmeline had carried cardboard boxes of toys, books, bed linen, clothes and kitchen utensils over to Easterly in the following spring. Ian, as the eldest son, stayed at Wind Rising. He had been twenty-three that March. He took on the farm, with Nathan to help him – as boys were meant to, back then. They had no choice in it, really, for their father had started his heart trouble in the autumn before and could no longer farm. It had changed Jack – that shock, the air ambulance and the diet that was forced upon him left him a weaker man who could no longer haul sheep onto their rumps to shear them, or change tractor tyres. And Hester had already met George Moss. So Ian and Nathan became real farmers; and Emmeline, Jack and young Tom moved over the fields to this easterly place.

She counts on her fingers. Tom had been thirteen years old.

Those were my best years. Perhaps she should say that her best years were the first few of her marriage, or when all her children were young – but that’s not the truth. She loved the days when her eldest boys were farmers, men in their twenties who were strong and well-made and living their own lives, men who’d kiss their mother’s hair when they came in to see her but who went into her fridge without asking as if they were still small boys. She’d smiled, at that. Hester was in love – blooming with it. And Tom had spent his days running through fields or on beaches, coming back in the evenings with his pockets filled with shells or feathers or mussels for eating and with a head filled with stories. Mum, guess what I heard? She loved how he smelled. She loved how her youngest boy filled the house with his own sounds – his voice as he talked to the cat, his music, his bedsprings, the scuffing of his socked feet on the kitchen’s flagstone floor.

Those were Jack’s best years too, in some ways. He had nearly died, and survived it. A quietness came to him that he had never had before – gratitude, perhaps, or an awareness for the first time that he would be gone one day. He was a better husband, after his heart attack. He became the man she’d hoped for, all along. She remembers holding his hand in this garden, on a summer’s morning like this.

Her peonies nod in the breeze.

How does a person ever speak of their loss? How do they find the right words for it? Emmeline has never really been the talking kind.

She looks down at her hands. The hand cream has served no purpose. She has soil beneath her fingernails, again – brown crescent moons. Only a farmer or his wife would have hands like this, day in and day out. She had made her wedding vows with neat, square nails, and the following evening she’d glanced down at her hands – dirtied from the chicken shed, and from picking blackberries from the patch by the back door – and had thought this is how it will be, now. These are my married hands. She nearly lost her wedding ring, once, during the lambing season. A farmer’s wife’s hands, even now.

Briefly, there is resentment. It rises a little, like a far-out wave.

Emmeline looks up. A man is coming to her. He is a man, but he is also one of her sons, and so despite his age she still sees the child who had knocked his front milk teeth out when he fell on the quayside, the boy who believed, solemnly, that he’d heard sleigh bells on the roof one Christmas Eve. Nathan wears a white shirt. He walks with his hands in his pockets and when he sees her, he frees one hand and holds it up at her. He bends his fingers in a small, boyish wave.

Hello, she says. She hugs him by the peonies, and she can smell the sea in his hair. She does not hug for long, but when Emmeline goes to pull away from him she finds that Nathan is still holding her. He holds her very tightly, too tightly. She waits. She stays as she is, being held, and it is only when his arms start, at last, to soften, that she leans back from him and looks at his face – at the straight nose, the shining eyes – and she breathes, what is it? What’s wrong?

* * *

Nathan knew it had to be him who told her. Ian wouldn’t think of it. He’d call it unimportant or nothing to do with me. He probably slept well last night, snoring in Wind Rising as if nothing had changed, as if no man had been found at Sye.

Nathan has not slept at all. He knows it shows. Kitty said as much when she crept downstairs to find him still sitting in the armchair, an empty glass tilted in his lap. She’d said, you look like crap, Mr Bundy, smiling and stroking his knee.

As he’d walked along the lane to Easterly he’d tried out the different words in his head, whispered them under his breath, and he’d hoped that perhaps his mother would be out – that he’d find a note on the doormat saying gone to shop or elsewhere. But he’d looked up and seen her. She’d been tending to those pink flowers of hers, and he’d thought she looks old. The hunched back, the iron-grey hair.

When they’d hugged, Nathan had felt small again.

Now, they stand inside. She is looking at him, waiting. She licks her lips as she always does when she is nervous, and she says is it Kitty?

No.

Hester, then? Ian? The grandchildren?

No, Mum. Everyone’s fine.

You? Are you fine?

Been better …

Are you ill?

Mum … He’s forgotten the words. He tries to think of them but cannot so he puts his hands on top of her hands and says listen. Some stuff happened last night. At Sye.

Sye? She is frowning. The cove?

Sam Lovegrove was walking up there –

What happened? Did he fall, or …?

Sam’s OK, too. Mum, listen – he found a man. Washed up on the beach.

Emmeline is still.

Sam thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. He was lying on his front … Sam ran to the farm and got us – me, Ian, Jonny. We all went to Sye, and we carried him back. Took him to Aunt Tabitha’s.

Nathan pauses, breathes. He watches his mother’s face, and waits until her eyes show what he knows she will, shortly, be thinking. He waits. He waits. And then he sees her eyes change.

She says, Oh God …

Mum, it isn’t Tom.