Sea Hearts (21 page)

Next day I rose, and dressed what felt like an entirely new body, an entirely new man, in the ordinary clothing of the old. I kissed sleeping Neme, and took up her skin that had lain folded all night on the blanket-chest, and tucked it into my coat. I went out into the world, which greeted me wet and windily, full of a cruel and exhilarating light.

Up the town I climbed to Wholeman’s inn, and peered in at the window. Wholeman was at work in there, wiping down tables. I knocked on the window, then met him at the door.

He squinted up at me. ‘I know you, I’m sure,’ he said, ‘though it’s very early for a welcome-home drink.’

‘That’s not what I’m after. May I speak with you a moment?’

‘Why, certainly! You’re Mallett’s boy, aren’t you, that his mam took off to Cordlin years ago?’ He stood back for me and I stepped in. The empty room smelt of men and pipe-smoke and ale; it had no ornament beyond mounted fishes and a stag’s head on the walls.

‘That’s me: Dominic Mallett,’ I said, with the smile of a man who has had his name whispered in his ear all night. We shook hands. ‘And I have come into a fortune.’

‘You have? Well, you’re very welcome to spend it here,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Oh,’ he then said as I pulled Neme’s skin-parcel free of my coat. ‘It must have been
quite
a fortune, to persuade Misskaella out so late in the season.’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I found my lady on the beach last night, just this side of Forward Head, singing on the rocks there.’ This was the story Misskaella had advised me to tell.
I owe you money,
I had said foolishly, not even looking at her, because that would mean tearing my gaze from Neme’s. But,
Let me give
you
a gift,
the witch had cooed,
just to see what that feels like.

‘
Found
her?’ Wholeman took the skin from me, and looked up wide-eyed. ‘Singing on the rocks? For the taking?’

‘She is at my house now. She has agreed to stay awhile.’

Wholeman shook his head slowly. ‘I have heard of such luck, women coming up by themselves,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never known a man to have it, not in my time.’

‘Well, now you have, Wholeman,’ I said. ‘But my fix is still the same as every man’s, to keep the skin where she cannot find it, for she says she does not trust herself to resist the lure of the sea, if she knows of the skin’s whereabouts, or finds it accidentally. Do I remember, you used to have a locked room out the back here?’

‘I did and I do. Shall I hang this there with the others?’

‘Would you? And what do I owe you for it?’

‘Owe me? Why, a little custom now and then, that’s all.’

‘No fee, for the keeping? Are you sure?’

‘There’s enough debt in this town without my taking men’s pennies for a bit of hanging-space I’d not use otherwise. If you don’t owe Misskaella, you are one of the few who doesn’t. You must drink twice the amount for your good fortune.’ But he was laughing at me, and he clapped me on the arm. ‘I will put it away safely right now, lucky man.’

Next I went to Fisher’s store and bought milk and foodstuffs, and a dress that Neme might leave the house in without shame, and so on. There was no means of keeping my luck and my decision secret there either, any more than there had been at Wholeman’s. Fisher was much more excited by it, though, than Wholeman, and brought his wife Darely out to tell her the news directly; he expressed hearty congratulations, and was in awe of how well things had turned out for me, that I had not had to pay as others had; Darely, more quietly, asked whether I had hidden the skin, and did I intend to marry Neme, and when would I bring her to meet the rest of the wives? She helped me buy underthings for Neme, and forced the loan of a cardigan and coat on me ‘to keep the poor maid cosy’; she asked after the state of my firewood and food, in between Neepny throwing questions at me as they occurred to him: ‘What will you tell your betrothed, though, back in Cordlin?’ and ‘How will you keep yourself? You will have to get a place on one of the boats.’

They sent me away laden with gifts and necessities, even coming to the door to see me off. Darely wrung her hands as if she wished she could come with me and see my new wife settled. I climbed the hill much encouraged — relieved, in fact, that now I had company. Potshead was full of Dominic Malletts, each devoted alike to his strange wife, each intent on keeping her, and keeping her happy as far as he was able.

Back at the house I showed Neme how to dress, and we breakfasted, amid many small adventures of discovery and misinterpreting. I took her down to Fisher’s, then, and to Shy Tyler’s and Fametta’s, where she was welcomed with many embraces and exclamations. Fametta and Darely promised to care for her while I attended to my Cordlin business. They talked of wedding-preparations, and gatherings of the wives to welcome Neme among them, and I nodded, and thanked them, and felt a little panicked. This was the day my mam and dad had brought me up to avoid, yet here it was, folding me compliantly into itself as an octopus folds a fish towards its mouth.

Then I took Neme and we walked, out beyond Crescent Corner to Six-Mile Beach, where you can stride the sand forever if you’ve a temper or a mood to pound away. We walked, and sometimes we talked, about my predicament and her new life, and about the people we had just met, and the little I knew of them, from long ago. How different it was from conversing with Kitty! With each utterance Neme and I must seek ways to make sense to each other, speaking out of our different pasts, our different worlds above and below water, our different beings. Kitty and I had always been turning over matters and objects familiar to both of us; by comparison, that had been like talking to myself, I was so easily understood. From here, on the beach, with Neme questioning me and her slim foreign hand in the crook of my arm, the conversation with Kitty seemed a dull one, revealing nothing, taking neither of us anywhere new.

I told Neme of my intention to go to Cordlin and tell Kitty face to face what had happened.

‘But Dominic Mallett,’ she said. ‘Once you see Kitty, might not your love for her rush back upon you? I fear you will stay and marry her as you said, simply because you are there and in sight of her. Just as you could put her aside and love me on first sighting, won’t you be able to put
me
aside, when she is there before you, ready to kiss and marry you?’

I stopped on the sand, open-mouthed. ‘You think me so fickle?’ I said. ‘You think I have had…nights such as we have just had, with Kitty? You think my loyalty and love shift so easily to whichever woman is before me?’

‘Why would they not?’

I had to explain to her, then, that men were not like bull-seals, with their many wives, that we mated one-to-one like bird-pairs and many other animals. ‘I can never put aside the thought of you,’ I said, ‘now that we have met.’

Into my hand she pressed a sea-penny, one of those shells worn flat on one side, grooved on the other like the inside of a person’s ear. ‘Hold this in your pocket while you talk to Kitty,’ she said, ‘and remember me.’ She folded my fingers around it, a measure of doubt still in her eyes.

‘I will,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. How can I tell you so that you’ll believe me? This is different, this is a proper love; I am helpless against this, whereas Kitty, I now discover, I can take or leave.’

‘Who knows what else you may discover?’ She pushed the hand with the shell in it into my coat pocket.

I dropped the shell there and took Neme in my arms. I tried, with all the warmth that I wrapped her in, with all the force I could summon to an embrace, with the length and depth of all my kisses, to convince her as I was
beyond
convinced, as I knew in my bones, to my deepest innards and my heart of hearts: that I was hers, flesh and soul of me, for as long as I lived, that I would not forsake her, because I
could
not, but was helplessly hopelessly hers forever.

‘At this hour?’ said Mrs Flaming at the door. ‘We are all but abed!’

‘I’ve important news for Kitty,’ I said. ‘It cannot wait.’

‘You young people, you
always
think it cannot wait. Come in, then, into the parlour.’ Annoyed, she looked, and inconvenienced — and this was as kindly as she would ever look on me again. I watched her hurry away up the hall, and then I stepped into the parlour, which was aglow with the new electrics that the family were so proud of.

Every candlestick, every silk flower, every landscape on the wall, had once held and increased the glamour of my love for Kitty, but now each object only seemed to speak, and rather smugly, of well-earned comfort and a kind of terror of not being thought tasteful. Look at those drapes! How many layers of cloth did you need at a window, how many tassels and fringes, to keep out the light and the cold, to thwart prying eyes? I crossed the room slowly towards the screened fireplace, the mantel loaded with pictures and figurines. I felt as if I carried the weight of it on my own back. How had I made sense of such things before? My little time on Rollrock had emptied my head of rooms like this, the detail of them, the fuss and filling of spaces. What more did you need than a chair and a fire, and another chair with Neme curled up and dreaming across at you? What gave lovelier light than a spirit-lamp, which left some mystery to linger in the darker corners?

Kitty’s hurried footsteps sounded in the hall; dread flooded my head and churned in my stomach. Then she was there in the doorway, and I lifted my eyes to hers. Her face was fresh and unguarded, as if she had been asleep, her hair hastily gathered up, fine curls falling from it. She had never looked prettier. She was pleased to see me, and surprised, and amused. She thought I had come because I could not bear to betake me to my rest without seeing her, holding her, asserting our bond once more.

I might reassure her with a smile. I might cross to her and embrace her — I knew exactly how she would feel, the bold curves of her that had once excited me. I could choose, coldly, to undo everything I’d done on Rollrock. I could confess to it, or I could keep it secret; I could invent an excuse to return to the island, give Neme back her skin and send her home to the sea. I could do my duty to this woman before me, and no one in Cordlin need be any the wiser.

I couldn’t put it off a moment longer. ‘I have taken me a sea-wife,’ I said — softly, as if it would hurt her less that way.

All pleasure went from her face — I would never see it there again. She gave a little cry — ‘I knew it!’— and bent in the middle as if struck. Softer and flatter she spoke: ‘I should not have let you go.’ She straightened, took a few steps into the room, then retreated and sat in the upright chair by the door, and put her face in her hands. ‘Tell me,’ she said into them. Then she looked up at me, haughty, white-lipped. ‘What has happened.’

‘She came up from the sea.’ I pressed my shoulder-blades against the mantel. ‘Of her own choice.’

‘Saw you standing there, did she? Could not resist you?’ I could see how Kitty would be as an old woman, with this roundedness gone from her face, with this bitter tightness about her mouth.

‘I found her on the beach.’ I saw Misskaella bending to the seal praying, the flesh splitting deeply, shining wet in the moonlight.

‘What were you doing on a
beach
— pacing up and down and hoping? You were supposed to be selling a house
,
crating up two chairs
,
not wandering about the island looking for trouble!’ I could see how she would have scolded our children, the thin line of her lips.

‘I had done all I could do that day. I had had supper with Shy Tyler and Fam — his wife, their little boy…’ My voice faded on the disapproving silence.

‘So,’ she said. ‘You are here to tell me that you don’t want to marry me any more.’ She raised a hand and dropped it, almost with a slap, to her thigh.

‘I wish I
could
marry you,’ I said sincerely, ‘to avoid you the embarrassment — ’

‘I wish you could, too, for better reasons than that.’ Her voice was low and harsh. ‘I wish you could marry me out of love for me, love that you said you felt, and that was firmly enough set before you stepped aboard that boat to Rollrock. You are not the man I thought you, if you can be pushed so easily from the path we had laid out for ourselves.’

‘I am not the man
I
even thought me,’ I said. ‘What can I say? I am bewitched.’ I saw it cleanly, truly, then, for a moment: Misskaella’s work, Misskaella’s fault.

‘You are
stupid
,’ she hissed, ‘to have let yourself be enchanted. To have put yourself in the way of it.
Two
chairs,
you told me.
It will be so nice for us to have them, side
by side, Mam’s and Dad’s.
While all the time, I should not be surprised —

’ I had crossed the room to her while she spoke. ‘Kitty, it was not like that! There was no forethought, no scheming against you, I promise! I am as surprised as you!’ Though I should not be, I realised. Why else would Rollrock be so afraid of that witch, if not because she could snare us like this, whenever she chose?

Kitty’s eyes were dead; her lips pressed together. The freckles seemed to hover just in front of her face like a cloud of russet insects. ‘Yet you emerge from
your
surprise with a bewitching woman, and an island full of men clapping you on the back. While I come from
my
surprise with what? A crowd of people to explain to, a meal to pay for — a
cake
, for goodness’ sake! And the knowledge that I’ve been made a fool of, that my sweetheart all these years was never mine. A mermaid had only to crook her finger at him, and he’d be gone.’