The Brides of Rollrock Island, Page 2

  ‘Yes,’ she said with dislike, ‘You can see it clearly, looking from the others to this one. She is much later than the rest?’

  ‘There are four years,’ said Mam, ‘between her and Tatty, the next youngest.’

  ‘There is your problem, then,’ said Nanny. ‘Prout men should never breed late. Nor Prout women. They turn, you know, in their autumns, and then you get miscast faces like this, and who knows what behind them?’

  ‘Oh, Mam,’ Aunt Baxter laughed even higher than before. ‘Here is Froman, come to see you before you go to your rest, and all you can do is fix on his children and criticize!’ But her face was all dismay, looking at me. My hand came up to touch my nose and mouth, but they were only the same nose and mouth I had always had; there was nothing new or monstrous about them.

  Only Dad was allowed to kiss Nanny goodbye – not that any of us minded one ounce not putting our lips to that crinkled cheek. It would be cold, I thought. It would smell of tallow wax, maybe, or mushrooms.

  Then we were dismissed. Dad was quiet walking along the lanes, but the rest of us were glad to be out in the moving air. Billy lifted his head and looked about, for a change, and the girls danced from step to step.

  Tatty eyed me where I walked at Mam’s hand. ‘She had a set against our Missk, didn’t she!’

  ‘Hush, Tat,’ said Mam, and Dad clicked his tongue. But already Grassy and Lorel were carolling, ‘Ye-es! Missk and her funny looks!’

  ‘“Miscast”, she said.’ Ann Jelly too examined me. ‘What could she mean?’

  ‘I’ve always thought Miss did look differently,’ Tatty galloped sideways ahead of us. ‘Not quite part of the same family.’ And now they all stared. I screwed up and stretched my face so that they should not see my difference clearly.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Mam. ‘Take the word of a dying woman, would you, one who’s always hated me and mine? Of course she’s going to find fault with us! And who safer to insult than the very littlest of all!’

  ‘Gussy,’ said Dad.

  ‘Tell me it isn’t true, then,’ said Mam. ‘She won’t miss us and I won’t grieve after her.’

  He shrugged and looked away, and the matter seemed done with. But Mam did not look down at me, and her grip was tight and wrenching of my shoulder, as if I ought to be punished rather than consoled.

  ‘You see?’ said Bee.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Tatty. ‘Which stone is it, even?’

  Neither could I see. I stood away from the garth wall. The stones, in the lumpiest part above the gate, looked even more higgledy-piggledy in this slant of light.

  ‘The seal head is fallen away that side of the maiden.’ Lorel waved to the left and then to the right. ‘See the skin of it, along and across, those three lines coming to the point, then to the little tail?’

  ‘The tail is almost worn right away,’ said Bee.

  ‘Oh, that is the tail, is it?’ said Tatty doubtfully.

  ‘And so the maiden is rising out of the skin, you see? And her beautiful hair? That is all those whirls – though Nanny Paul used to say her nanny told her that all their hairs were flat as boards, not a kink or curl among them.’

  ‘She has a big head,’ I said. ‘And hardly any body at all.’

  ‘See, Tat? Even Missk can see her,’ said Grassy.

  ‘A head and a bosom.’ Billy chewed a grass-stalk, slumped against the opposite wall. Lorel laughed dirtily. The circles of the stone bosoms popped out at me, the peck-marks of the nipples. My face went hot. Imagine carving such a thing, for all to see!

  ‘She doesn’t look a very happy maiden,’ said Tatty, ‘to be come to live among us.’

  ‘Oh, they were right miseries, everyone says,’ said Grassy.

  ‘Everyone?’ said Bee. ‘Who have you heard say? I cannot get anyone to talk for long about it. Mam closes up like a trap, and Dad will find something he must be busy with. And Nanny Paul, sometimes she would rattle on as long as you liked, but most often she would only put up her eyebrows, insulted.’

  ‘Maybe it’s boring for them,’ groaned Billy. ‘Seeing as it never happens any more.’

  ‘There’s nothing keeping you here, Billy,’ said Bee crisply. ‘Go and kick footer if you’re so bored of us.’

  ‘Plenty say it never happened at all, girls coming out of seals,’ said Lorel.

  ‘Well, how could it?’ said Tatty. ‘It would be like a cat birthing a dog, or a horse throwing a goat.’

  ‘There’s no birthing of it at all,’ said Ann Jelly. ‘It is the same creature. Only its skin comes off and the girl is within.’

  ‘Oh, pfft,’ said Tatty. ‘Whoever heard of such a thing?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ said Grassy. ‘What’s wrong with your ears?’

  ‘And you hide that skin,’ said Bee darkly. ‘For if she finds it, she snatches it up and is gone, no matter how nicely you’ve treated her, no matter how many children she’s had on the land.’

  ‘She will abandon her children?’ said Ann Jelly, and I was shocked too. I knew Mam didn’t like us, but I couldn’t imagine her leaving us. We eyed the bosomy woman high on the wall. She stared out unashamed.

  ‘As if they never were,’ said Bee. ‘And never come back to visit them, either.’

  ‘What dreadful creatures,’ said Lorel. ‘What would a man ever want with one of those?’

  Ann Jelly and I sat with Gert along Strangleholds’ step, in the sunshine.

  ‘Slide aside,’ said Gert’s mam. ‘I must go down to May’s and get those eggs. Stay about till I’m back, Gert. I’ll not be blamed for letting Prouts’ little one wander off.’

  We let her through and watched her hurry along the lane. She paused to greet Ardle Staines’s mam, then continued on around the corner.

  ‘I’ll show you something.’ Gert scrambled up.

  Ann Jelly made eyebrows at me and jumped up too.

  After the sunshine, all I could see in the house was the window through the back. Gert’s parents’ bedroom was quite black, the two girls hissing and giggling in there. I stepped in and waited, and their shapes emerged, shadows bent over a chest with its lid open against the wall.

  ‘Don’t move anything,’ said Gert. ‘It’s right at the back here. Hold the clothes and blankets away, so it doesn’t catch on them.’

  The back of the chest seemed to come away in her hands. She pulled it up. Then she tipped it, and I saw the wire by which it had once hung on a wall, and the glass front reflecting the curtain-edge with its bit of trapped light.

  They bent over the picture.

  ‘It’s a person,’ said Ann Jelly.

  ‘A lady,’ said Gert.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ I said.

  Gert pulled the curtains a little apart. I edged in next to Ann Jelly. The lady’s eyes were large in her face, and dark. She looked as if she had suffered a great shock and was staring from it, not seeing us, waiting for an explanation.

  ‘Who is she?’ said Ann Jelly.

  ‘She’s an ancestor.’

  ‘But she looks like no one! None of you have those eyes, or that hair either.’

  ‘It fades out quick, says Mam, that look. The red takes back over – thank heaven, she says.’

  I had seen that mouth before. I had fingered it before the mirror; I had pressed the lips tightly closed as I was doing now, so they would not show so much. But if I had had this face around them, they would have been beautiful; they would have fitted with the rest, and been nothing to be ashamed of at all.

  ‘Why don’t you have her on the wall?’ I reached out and rattled the wire. ‘She is all ready for hanging.’

  ‘She’s a secret, Mam says. She is our greatest shame. She must stay hidden away.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ said Ann Jelly.

  ‘No one remembers, she’s so long ago in our family. Isn’t she beautiful?’

  ‘She looks like a Spanish queen,’ said Ann Jelly thoughtfully. ‘Out of Mister Wexford’s story-book, up at school.’


  ‘Yes!’ Gert sounded pleased. ‘Perhaps she was royal there, under the sea.’

  They pulled the curtains wider, examined the woman more closely. ‘Her delicate hands,’ said Ann Jelly.

  ‘See, they have made her smile here, just a little?’ Gert waved a finger over the lips in the painting, and I bit my own away again. ‘But her eyes are still sad.’ She covered the curvy mouth; the eyes gazed out mournfully over the edge of her hand.

  ‘We must put her away. Mam mustn’t know I showed you. And you mustn’t tell – Misskaella won’t tell, will she?’

  ‘Not if I tell her not to.’ Ann Jelly widened her eyes at me.

  ‘I won’t say a word.’ But she didn’t need to caution me. I had not the words or the worldliness to describe the Spanish-queen lady, and how new she was to me, yet how familiar.

  They slid the picture back down behind the blankets, and closed the lid; I pretended to help, although I was really too small to be of much use. I only wanted the chance to touch the wood, so old, so ornamented – the perfect container for a secret. My plump little hand looked so impertinent among the carved flowers! I snatched it away.

  We went out and sat as we’d sat before, along the step. We hardly spoke until Gert’s mam came back, and called us monkeys in a row, and freed us to run off and play. Gladly we sprang away from our naughtiness and solemnity, and from the stare of the lady in the picture.

  I woke one day to find everything stretched and reaching, as if the world were a pot on the boil, and someone had taken its lid off and let the steam pour up wildly. I must be ill, I thought, but I felt no pain, no turmoil of my stomach, and I could get up and move about much as I always did. No one else seemed to notice how high or heightened everything had gone, how the essence of things rushed and flapped in my heart. My sisters chattered among themselves as usual, cried at me to hurry along.

  When it came my turn to cross the threshold to go to school, I was as fearful as a field-mouse about to dash from under a rock, the huge sky over me threatening hawks. Nobody seemed to suspect the act of will it took me to move from hallway to step. Once out, for a moment I felt myself to be a queen stepping stately from my palace, my subjects cheering that I glorified their world by walking upon it; then I was only wretched Misskaella again, and walls and chimneys twitched and flickered when they should stay still.

  I hung back from the others, their bent backs as they climbed, their turning aside to speak; now they laughed, faces pale against the slope of damp cobbles. How lucky they were, not to have gone raw like their sister!

  ‘Do stop dawdling, Missk!’ cried Tatty to me.

  Time and again I must force myself to see that no actual wind frayed or bent the air. I feared that at any moment I would be caught up bodily and thrown high away, or dissolved grain by grain up into this invisible wind. Surely my mind would break soon from seeing this, from seeing through the skin of things to the flesh and the bone, to the breath gusting through and the blood pouring about? I would die of it, or fall into some kind of terrible fit. For the first time I was seeing life truly, and the truth would overwhelm me; a person couldn’t bear this sight for long – a girl of nine should not be expected to bear it. Look at the power all but bursting from every cobblestone and grain of grit between! See how it was loosed in dribs and drabs so measuredly, moss crawling there in a corner, a schoolboy here running along his lane to join us, his greetings peeping within the roar-that-was-not-a-roar. Oh, the sky! I was glad of the clouds, the glowering light, for they seemed to my timid eyes to contain this ongoing event, though another, fresh-born, braver Misskaella behind those eyes knew that cloud or clearness was nothing to the purposeful flaring. It would leap regardless, pushed on outward by the forces from below.

  The schoolhouse stood as solidly dreadful as ever, in a sea of children whirling excited. Invisible flames poured through them. The bell rang, and its chimes sent a ripple across the air, which crossed and combined with the energy fountaining from below, and flew off as bright-curling streamers into the grey.

  Inside, all day, my mind’s flames kept burning up the world, never consuming it; its winds howled and yet moved nothing and took nothing away. Each action and object in this tiny schoolroom seemed a marvel to me – Mister Wexford so certain of himself, the rows of us so willingly chanting this, imagining that, writing the other thing upon our slates. At moments everything’s solidity quite gave way, and the schoolhouse seemed constructed of dream-matter, plastered with illusion, the heavy desks as liable as all the rest to be snatched up and poured away into the sky. When would I fall in the fit or faint that would end this?

  That afternoon I waded through the spangled air and handled all the dazzling objects necessary to completing my chores. When they all were done, ‘I am going down the town,’ I told Bee, ‘to walk on the mole, if Mam asks.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Bee from inside her book on her bed. I had chosen to tell her because she was the most distracted sister, and the least likely to find another chore for me, or to insist on coming too.

  I let myself out of the flickering house. Outside, cobbles and houses shuddered, rain spat and the clouds glared; the air was bitter, empty of spring promise. I descended the town all eyes and ears and goose-fleshed skin. I stayed composed, though I felt like running, leaping with the leaping stuff, calling out, encouraging it and being encouraged.

  So as to have told the truth to Bee, I did walk upon the mole, right out to the end and back again. My eyes lied to me: the town sat as it always did, they said, above the waterfront. But my mind insisted that the houses were in a continual slow scramble on its slope, and that colourless matter sheeted up between myself and that effortful movement, between myself and the tiny glinting windows, the town’s many eyes. Behind and around me the horizon shook in the upflying wind, as if the sea were on the point of bursting from its bowl, taking flight entirely.

  I strode away north along the main beach so that no one looking out from Potshead should know what I intended. When I was out of sight of the town I took the dune path up past Thrippence’s bothy, through and through the slipping sand. Across McComber’s fields I went diagonally; not a soul walked the road or hill there, only McComber’s cows stared, chewing their cud. Up and over the stile at the top I climbed, and then I was on the straight road. I ran; I had hardly run at all since people began to laugh at the spectacle, but now – oh, the joy of being alone and unjudged! – I all but flew along, not feeling clumsy or ridiculous at all. The rain spat cold and gleefully in my face; the road ahead seemed as cheered to be empty as I was to see it so; to either side, high on the hilltop, far out to sea, the shaken-out cloth of creation took flashing fire here and there, and the flame rushed upward and away, and was renewed from below.

  I slowed towards the cliff-top, then peered over it. There the seals lay like bobbins in a drawer, greys and silvers, fawns and browns, some mottled, others smoothly one-coloured tip to tip. The babies, very brown, were all movement and enterprise among the lounging mothers. I remembered crawling forth as a bab myself; I felt the same urge now as I had then, to run from the top of the cliff and fall in among the seals below. Surely I would be buoyed up by this fountaining air, like a coracle in the top of a wave?

  Instead, I hurried, sister-free, alone in the land- and seascape, around the rim of the cove. I began down the path, and it was as if I stepped into a pool of quite a different temperature, or put myself in the way of a different angle of the wind. I touched my hair, but it was only fluttered a little by the natural wind, not streaming starkly upright as it ought to in this other flow.

  Halfway down I paused, because the nursery had begun to boil below me. The bull and the bachelors, out beyond the main crowd, had stopped duelling in the shallows, and now they sat up alert to my approach. More and more heads rose among the mothers and the mothers-to-be. Slower I went now, down the path. The closer I came to them, the clearer I saw – distributed through the pearly-coated blubber-bulk of each seal’s body, and even along
the delicate flippers and tails, like blooms across a spring field – the stars, the seeds, the grains that could be brought together. If time, tide and circumstance were right, I could persuade them to combine, at the centre of the seal-being, into a man-like or a woman-like form. I saw that the creature on the garth wall, the woman rising from the skin of a seal, was no fancy, that the crumbs of story Potshead people dropped all fitted together, much as these grains did, and made a history – a history that might be repeated if such as I happened along. I had known it and never known it. I was astonished, even as so many questions were laid to rest.

  I stood in the welter of power and shadow at the bottom of the cove. I gritted my teeth and stepped from path to rock; I lifted my gaze to meet the seals’.

  The king, down in the shallows, yawped and snarled and swung his face in the sky. In front of him the restless mothers tipped and raised themselves and eyed me, one or two giving cry; from among them, struggling through their soft shivering hills and dales and tumbling forth onto the damp purplish rock, the young and the darker brown babies came, and when they had found flipper-footing they began to gallop towards me, as sheep hurry over their snowy field to a fresh-dropped hay-bale, or pigs cross a sty at the clank of the slop-bucket.

  Some of the mothers lumbered to follow, hoisting themselves up and rippling across the rock. What would they do when they reached me? Those babies’ eagerness alarmed me, and their clumsiness, and the mothers were so big! Did they aim to catch and crush me? Did they love or hate me? I could not tell from their black shiny eyes, from their rippling hides, from their pink mouths gaping and their gruff vague calls.

  I stepped back up onto the path. On they came, the mothers enlarging towards me, the babies so fast! Their edges wavered and glowed, left trails on the air; I could not tell how much was the magic of the day and how much was the weather, working up towards a storm – or indeed how much was mistakes of my own eyes, born of this new illness.

  Up the cliff path I scrambled. Halfway, puffing, I paused to look down; the pups boiled at the bottom, and one had managed to climb the path’s first step. I felt not the least desire to launch myself in among them now. How much wilder they were than people! – and even if they had been tame, their weight and numbers would have terrified me.