The Visitor

1. Title Page
   
2. Dedication
   
3. 'Linked'
   
4. PART ONE – Chapter One
   
5. PART ONE – Chapter Two
   
6. PART ONE – Chapter Three
   
7. PART ONE – Chapter Four
   
8. PART ONE – Chapter Five
   
9. PART TWO – 1880 and 1936
   
10. PART TWO – Chapter One
    
11. PART TWO – Chapter Two
    
12. PART TWO – Chapter Three
    
13. PART TWO – Chapter Four
    
14. PART TWO – Chapter Five
    
15. PART TWO – Chapter Six
    
16. PART TWO – Chapter Seven
    
17. PART TWO – Chapter Eight
    
18. PART TWO – Chapter Nine
    
19. PART TWO – Chapter Ten
    
20. PART TWO – Chapter Eleven
    
21. PART TWO – Chapter Twelve
    
22. PART TWO – Chapter Thirteen
    
23. PART TWO – Chapter Fourteen
    
24. PART TWO – Chapter Fifteen
    
25. PART TWO – Chapter Sixteen
    
26. PART TWO – Chapter Seventeen
    
27. PART TWO – Chapter Eighteen
    
28. PART THREE – 1936 and 1889
    
29. PART THREE – Chapter One
    
30. PART THREE – Chapter Two
    
31. PART THREE – Chapter Three
    
32. PART THREE – Chapter Four
    
33. PART THREE - Chapter Five
    
34. PART THREE – Chapter Six
    
35. PART THREE – Chapter Seven
    
36. PART THREE – Chapter Eight
    
37. PART THREE – Chapter Nine
    
38. PART THREE – Chapter Ten
    
39. PART THREE – Chapter Eleven
    
40. PART THREE – Chapter Twelve
    
41. PART THREE – Chapter Thirteen
    
42. PART THREE – Chapter Fourteen
    
43. PART THREE – Chapter Fifteen
    
44. PART THREE – Chapter Sixteen
    
45. PART THREE – Chapter Seventeen
    
46. PART THREE – Chapter Eighteen
    
47. PART THREE – Chapter Nineteen
    
48. PART THREE – Chapter Twenty
    
49. PART THREE – Chapter Twenty-One
    
50. PART THREE – Chapter Twenty-Two
    
51. PART THREE – Chapter Twenty-Three
    
52. PART THREE – Chapter Twenty-Four
    
53. PART THREE – Chapter Twenty-Five
    
54. Acknowledgements
    
55. Copyright
    

The Visitor

Katherine Stansfield

For my parents, for introducing me
to Tom Catchamouse

When I have pictured

a calm sea, there is your boat, waiting.

Ruth Bidgood, ‘Linked',
Above the Forests

One

‘Keygrims,' Nicholas says, ‘will call you by name. You'll be sleeping. This is how they sound.' He scratches his
knife across his plate. It's answered by a shriek of wind down the chimney. A cold gust blows round the room. She moves closer to his chair, hunching into the wood and biting her sleeve.

She was remembering, but she was back there, too. What was remembered was true. She was with Nicholas again.

‘You know what they are, don't you?' he says.

She looks at Jack who says nothing. His arms are wrapped around his knees and he's worrying a hole in his trousers. She shakes her head.

‘They're drowned men,' Nicholas says. ‘Come to claim the living.'

Shadows play across his face. She can't see if he's smiling. It's winter. Night comes in the afternoon and the weather is too poor to go outside. Their parents are in the house next door, Nicholas' house, praying for fish and to be watched over whilst at sea. Nicholas is trying to scare her and Jack. He doesn't believe in any of the other creatures that live in the sea. He doesn't believe her stories, or the one Jack tries to tell. Only keygrims.

‘What do they look like?' she says.

‘You and me, but their skin's gone, worn away by salt. And the bone underneath, it's shells. Only seaweed holds them together.'

The rain thrums on the windowpanes. Beyond the hearth the room is dark.

‘Once they've called you to the beach they wait for the waves to touch you and that's it.' He claps his hands and Jack jumps. ‘The keygrims take you.'

‘That's a lie. There's no such thing,' Jack says, trying to sound sure. His voice wavers. The curtains sigh in the draught. ‘I know about mermaids. They—'

‘There is such a thing as a keygrim,' Nicholas says. He turns to the fire and knocks some of the wood with his boot. Though the wood is almost burnt black some sparks find life and for a moment there's a glow around him. His cheeks are flushed red and his eyes are bright.

‘How do you know?' Jack says.

‘Because I've seen one.'

*

Keygrims, she whispered, will call me by name. The little room and the wind gusting fiercely – they were real things. She had been there, with Jack and Nicholas, talking of keygrims. She was still there, somehow, though the moment was so long ago.

Pearl held one of her hands to the sun. The skin was so thin that the light seemed to shine through it. She had lived by the sea all her life. The salt was wearing her away. The bones of her hand were raised, the knuckles lumpy and tight. Like shells. The wind whipped her hair across her face. It was long and tangled, tangy with seawater. It had to be dry before she went home, and she had to catch her breath. She couldn't let Jack know she'd been swimming. He wouldn't like it.

She followed the tide line, winding with the snake-shape of broken wood and seaweed, keeping her eyes on the sea. They were old friends. They had an understanding.

The water had been cold today. Her chest was tight. She concentrated on breathing. On timing each inhalation with a breaking wave.
When they take you, you're cursed to live in the sea and see the people you love cry because you left them behind.

She moistened her lips against the salt that had dried them. She knew she should go home, that she mustn't tire herself. She had walked by this sea and along these cliffs every day since she could walk, apart from those when she was laid up in bed. Now her body was stiffening against her. When she woke some mornings she didn't know the creases of her face. Cups shook in her grip. Her chest was often tight, as if hands were on her ribs, pressing to hear them crack.

She was walking away from Morlanow now, away from its busy streets and empty harbour, but she could still hear the building work: hammers thumping and the sudden slide of bricks falling.

The bulk of the cliff that closed off the far end of the little beach loomed over her. She'd walked further than she thought, hadn't noticed the effort it had taken until she stopped. Her legs trembled. A pale speck was crossing the water, coming in towards the harbour wall that divided her from the town's main beach, which would be crowded at this time of day. A pleasure boat most likely, rather than a fisherman. So few fishing boats went out from Morlanow now.

This beach was usually empty of visitors. It was more shingle than sand so no good for lying on. The currents were stronger than those of the main beach, pulling a swimmer out suddenly when the bottom shelved. She loved that moment of slippage, when her feet left the safety of the stones and she was weightless in the water. That was when she felt most herself. Her chest would ease and her legs and arms were those of her child self again. She could swim and swim, away from Morlanow, never once turning her head to look back.

But here she was, back on land and the sea still taunting her with its vastness. Pearl put her hands to her eyes and blocked out the harshness of the sun, letting the hiss of waves fill her ears. She thought of the water stretching across the world's surface to places she could only imagine.

The water that came to Morlanow's sands was the same that had brought pilchards to her father's nets when she was a child, when there had been keygrims and mermaids. It had taken them away too, but the fish were there somewhere. The sea was one great pull of movement, putting things down on one coast and then spiriting them to another. Nothing was ever truly lost, though she had grown tired of hoping, tired of searching for a sign that never came. She hated herself for looking, but she couldn't stop. If she stared hard enough at the dark line of the horizon she believed she could will a ship into view. It would just be a smudge at first, perhaps mistaken for a cloud's tail, then it would dip and roll into something recognisable. Each wave bringing it closer to shore would sharpen the outline, clearing to masts and sails. Then closer still and the hull would give up the shape of a man from its wooden sides; back, at last.

It was time to go. Jack would be home soon. She had to hide her wet things. She turned back towards the harbour wall. A glimpse of colour caught her eye. It was away to the left, at the foot of the sloping field that overlooked the beach. In the past, the women of Morlanow had laid their washing out on the grass to dry and for a moment the whole field was again a patchwork of aprons and nightshirts. She looked away. That was a sight she hadn't seen for a long time.

Moving closer to the bottom of the field, she saw that the colour came from delicate blue stems of viper's bugloss. Bugloss for sadness. They had been poked between two stones that formed the middle part of a small tower. It was a cairn, no more than a foot high. Each pebble bore some kind of marking; grey spider-lines, a darker split. The cairn was all but hidden by the scrubby sea-grass that clung where the drying field joined the stony beach beneath it. Who had raised the cairn? It wasn't made for show or to be noticed, tucked here. A memorial of the old kind, built to mark a loss. She walked on. It wasn't right to intrude. But the image of the cairn stayed with her even as she moved away, the tower growing taller in her mind until it was bigger than before, bigger than her, even. So much was lost that never saw such acts of remembrance. Her sister Polly had never had a stone in Morlanow, either on the beach or in the churchyard. Polly's passing hadn't had a marker of any kind. But that didn't mean the loss wasn't felt, wasn't real. Pearl carried the cairn inside her all the way along the beach. She was weighed down by its stones.

She made her way to the harbour wall and stopped to rest before ducking under its arch. She would need her strength to get through the crowds, the motor cars. The faces she didn't know. It was summer. Morlanow was strange to her. It kept changing its shape. Streets were moving, whole houses had disappeared. She was old and ill. It was 1936, and Nicholas was gone.

Two

Her hair was dry by the time Jack got home. It needed cutting, tidying. He didn't like it when it reached below
her shoulders like this, said it made her look like Alice Trelawn, the woman of their childhood who gutted dogfish for pence. He never wanted to be reminded of Alice, and neither did Pearl for that matter. Pearl's hair was grey and thin, like Alice's had been, and hard to pin neatly. But at least it dried quickly on the walk back from the beach. She'd just stowed her still-damp and sandy nightdress in the back of the cupboard by the hearth when she heard the front door go. She picked up some darning and tugged at the needle left ready in the cloth.

‘Hello,' he called.

She heard him get a drink of water from the pail. She took a last glance round the room to make sure everything was in the right place.

Her husband had been a broad man in his day, heavily built from years at sea hauling in nets and pots, but now he was sunk on his frame and looked as if he was wearing a body several sizes too large for him. His once blond hair had bleached to white and tufted at his ears. He was short but strong, apart from his hands. As soon as he appeared she could see they were swollen today. He pushed the door open with a fist.