The Travellers and Other Stories (5 page)

What she dreaded most was the thought of the children she would one day bear Lorm. She watched the other women kissing and cuddling theirs: all of them, as far as she could see, exactly alike, with the same tedious shock of thick, glowing curls, each one like something grown in the island's glutinous gingery clay and pulled from it. Sometimes she went across to her neighbours' houses to mind the children while their mothers went out on some errand. She could hardly tell one child from the next; the sight of them filled her with an indescribable boredom.

Harlean listened silently, and thought of the income to be had, should the fisherman and his friends or some other freak of nature ever set foot on their shores again.

Lorm knew all about the stolen halfpennies. He'd watched Gerda hurrying past their neighbours' low houses strung along the beach road until she reached the old woman's hovel right at the end. He'd heard the hiss of his own hair in the fire at night and asked himself how he could change to make his wife happy. He knew that his contentment with what they had, with the way things were, was a thorn to her. She couldn't bear him to tell her he had everything he wanted here in the island's pink, pleated cliffs, their russet pigs.

My beloved flame-haired wife.

She ended up storming off to the beach in a fury and he'd watch her from the house, a small strawberry smudge in the distance looking out to sea. He pictured the grim determined set of her square, heavy jaw. It was as if she believed that by the sheer force of her longing, she could change things.

One day, brought to furious tears by a batch of new dye—a deep, nauseating shade of copper that merged with everything around her and made her chest heave—Gerda screamed at Lorm like she never had before. Screamed at the back of his bowed red head bent over the logs as he arranged them carefully into a neat pyramid for their evening fire.

‘Aren't you ever curious, Lorm? Aren't you ever thirsty for something new that might be out there?' and she thrust a freckled finger towards the window in the direction of the sea.

Lorm felt her scorn in his back. He was conscious of his own head bobbing in and out of the fireplace as he worked, and thought how he must look like a fat red bird. He turned to look at his wife. Her flushed face was almost the same florid shade as her hair. He thought she looked lovely. He wished he could invent something to long for, but however hard he tried, nothing came into his mind. A hopeless, lopsided smile slid across his face. He shrugged, extended his empty, spade-shaped hands towards her and she ran out of the house, across the field behind and vanished into the trees.

On the other side of the wood, she stopped running, burning hot and choking. Her hair hung thickly over her arms; she picked up a hank of it, held it up to the light and groaned. The red trees blazed around her, in the water below the pink cliffs she could see shoals of coral fish moving, kicking up the sand beneath them and making it rise through the rosy water in scarlet clouds. A wave of nausea ploughed through her body, she shivered, her limbs shook, her teeth chattered and she sank to her knees. ‘God help me,' she whispered and vomited on the ground.

Harlean Gill was sure she'd glimpsed a sail out on the horizon. She was certain she could smell something new and foreign on the breeze.

If she closed her eyes she could picture his cabin, a map spread out on the table, showing a tiny dot in the middle of a great expanse of nothing. She could hear it crackle beneath his exploring fingers. In her mind's eye, she saw his notebooks, his specimen jars, his butterfly nets; she pictured his black hair arranged in a long pigtail, tied with a ribbon half-way down his back. She could see him opening the door of a narrow cupboard where his clothes hung like a rainbow.

She swept out the cramped, windowless room beneath the eaves, put two pillows on the floor in one corner and plumped them up till they looked like a pair of rosy cheeks. Crimson feathers flew out of the seams, turned slow somersaults in the air. She filled a lamp with oil. She was sweating when she'd finished, her dry hair stuck out like a wild auburn hedge, ruby dust rimed her fingernails. Finally, she checked the fit of the key in the roughly gouged lock, wiped the clay dish by the door with a fresh rag and sat down on the doorstep to wait.

Gerda lay in bed with the curtains drawn. She had been almost constantly unwell since the afternoon she'd run off into the woods. She was very quiet, too ill to go to Harlean's. She still tried to picture the fisherman but as the months went by she found it harder and harder without the help of the old woman's poetry. She began to wonder if the other women weren't right after all to say that Harlean had made him up, that such a being could not exist, and they should all forget about the whole thing. What did they want with such a man anyway? they said. They had everything they could ever need right here on the island. Slow tears crept down over Gerda's face, across the broad bridge of her nose and onto her cheeks and down behind her neck into the collar of her nightgown.

‘I am so sorry, Lorm', she said sometimes, touching the side of his face with sad affection.

She tried to shut out all thoughts of the future.

‘Don't,' she said, when Lorm tried to talk to her about the baby that was coming.

Occasionally she asked him to bring her something to pass the time: the darning egg and a needle and a handful of his worn-out socks. A pot of vegetables to peel. But one afternoon Lorm came home to find her crying again. She had cut her hand with the paring knife and it had bled onto the potatoes.

‘See, Lorm,' she said, holding up a potato so he could look. ‘There is no difference at all between the colour of my blood and the skin of this potato.'

The blank despair in his wife's eyes made Lorm's heart shrink.

Anxious and wary, he watched her. He emptied the crimson teapot onto the table, letting the coins trickle through his fingers. He picked up a halfpenny, turned it between his thumb and his forefinger, felt its uneven, frilly edge and wondered exactly how many like it his wife had given away already to the greedy, lying Gill woman with her mad stories and her false promises. He counted up all the money they had, arranging it into small piles according to its value. He told himself he would do anything if it would make his wife happy.

As the expected birth approached, he wandered restlessly in the woods and up and down the vacant beach below the single line of low houses where he and Gerda and all the other inhabitants of the island lived, all of them facing the ocean, a row of spectators looking out across an empty stage.

Harlean was nothing if not patient.

While Gerda pined in her bed and Lorm roamed about trying to distract himself from his worries, the old woman waited. She'd come to acknowledge that she'd been mistaken about the explorer being so close, about the sail of his ship already showing itself above the thin red line of the horizon. But she was as sure as she'd ever been that he was out there somewhere. The picture she had of him was as sharp and clear as it had been when it first bloomed in her mind; indeed it had become much clearer over the last few months; it had gathered depth and detail during the long evenings she'd spent sitting waiting in the dark, or moving slowly about in the little room that was prepared under the eaves for his imprisonment. A young man, he would be, well-made and tall—taller than Lorm. Married, no doubt, with a child of his own left behind when he boarded his ship. She saw a picture in a wooden frame of the wife and child—moon-pale and dark-haired just like him—on the small fold-out table he had bolted to the wall of his cabin. He would be a reluctant guest, almost certainly, however great Gerda's charms might be—and Harlean did not consider the young woman's charms to be very great. Lorm's wife, with her firm, slightly jutting jaw, the flatness over the bridge of the nose, was no beauty. Harlean worried the locked door would not be enough. Remembering the thick old chain she had used to hobble her old horse before it died, she scurried down the short open staircase, past her low bed with its ancient vermilion quilt, past the stone-cold hearth, and out by the door to fetch it.

If anyone could have got hold of him, if anyone could ever have conjured him up out of the sea, it would have been Harlean.

Lorm was out when the baby came.

A girl, born quickly and without trouble onto the stone floor early one morning. Still lying on her back, Gerda grasped it beneath its slippery armpits. It coughed and cried and its bandy legs pedaled the air as if it were trying to escape.

Gerda saw Lorm appear in the doorway, saw him stop and drop his soft crimson cap onto the ground and stare, open-mouthed.

Gerda stared too at the creature in her hands. She could never have imagined such a thing.

‘Look, Lorm,' she said.

Its hair was thick and dense and very red, like her own, like Lorm's beard; its skin freckled like hers with tawny spots, its jaw square and firm like hers too. It had Lorm's shovel-shaped hands. Her flat, broad nose. Gerda's stomach lurched and seemed to empty.

She held their daughter up to the light, showing Lorm the squashed tomato face, the lantern jaw, the shovel hands, the copper thatch of tough, clumpy hair.

Neither of them said a word. Lorm squatted on the floor next to his wife and in the silence they continued to look.

They loved her at once with a fiery passion that lasted all their lives.

THE CAPTAIN'S DAUGHTER

HE BEGAN, AS
you might expect, with quite small things. Coming downstairs with half his face unshaved, leaving the gas on when he'd finished cooking, gardening in his bare feet. Within a couple of months, he had adopted a clumsy, shuffling gait; sudden expressions of panic and confusion.

These days he seems worse. He appears frightened now, when I leave the room, a look of startled alarm freezes his features. There are times when we are out in the street when he truly does not seem to know where he is, and if I let go of his arm for two seconds to go and post a letter, or to go and get the Pay & Display sticker for the car, I come back to find him standing next to it, apparently bewildered and afraid, anxiously toeing the gravel with the point of his shoe. One day in the kitchen a while ago he was making one of his Bakewell tarts and he couldn't remember what an egg was.

Then last Thursday morning, he came downstairs without his hand.

He stood in the kitchen doorway, smiling at me. He was fully dressed—socks, slippers, grey wool-mix trousers, clean shirt, cardigan—but he was missing his hand. The shock made me drop my tea cup. It smashed on the kitchen floor, spattering my bare leg with scalding liquid and tiny sharp chips of porcelain.

‘Oh for goodness sake, Daddy,' I said, appalled.

I led him back upstairs and he appeared to be genuinely confused and quite distressed to see his hand lying there on the bedside table. He put it on and took my arm and we came back down and had our poached eggs together before Frannie arrived to keep an eye on him and I left for the shop.

On Saturday he wandered off into town by himself to buy potatoes for a shepherd's pie and couldn't find his way home. By chance Dr. Ray saw him standing at the top of the high street and drove him back to our front door.

The hand incident really bothered me.

I have always thought of my father's hand as an integral part of who he is and now it seemed possible that he was quite literally falling apart.

In the old days, before his retirement, it defined him absolutely. You could see it in the eyes of the people who worked for him, that they thought of him as ruthless and hard, a little cruel perhaps, and certainly quite frightening. You could see that none of them liked the feel of his hand—its sudden heaviness, the gloved weight of the softly curled fingers, the unexpected seams in its stitched skin. My father is a big, burly man and although his hand was not necessarily the first thing people noticed about him, it was always what they remembered afterwards. It has always been his trademark—his banner, if you like, his public sign. In those days, it marked him out as the boss, the chief, and I loved that.
A Captain of Industry
my Aunt Wyn used to call him. I loved that he was in charge, that he was powerful and important.

And despite the horrible circumstances in which he lost his real hand, I have never, if I'm completely honest, regretted its loss in the long run. I have always liked its leather-clad replacement. I like its heaviness, its solidity. When I was a little girl I used to love the way it closed like a lid onto the thin ball of my shoulder. Its weight then was the most comforting thing in the world. I loved the sight of my own small fist cupped in his smooth black palm, like a white bud. At school when people asked me about it I used to enjoy telling them it had been bitten off by a crocodile, which shut them up pretty quickly and made them regard me with a kind of shocked envy.

Even in the final years before his retirement, when his power was waning and others—younger men—were jostling to get in there and take his place, it always seemed to me to be the thing that stopped him looking beaten. Even when he came home one day with a slim little box in a plastic carrier bag and said he had decided to do something about his hair which by then had grown sparse and silvery. Even when he stepped out of the bathroom onto the landing wearing an uncertain smile and ludicrously dark, solidly black hair, and some of the dye began to trickle tragically from his left temple into one of the crooked paths in the skin of his face and he looked like poor old Dirk Bogart in
Death in Venice
, sitting in his deckchair beside the lagoon, dying of love and Asian cholera, and I had to say, ‘Oh, Daddy, come here, let me clean this off.' Even early the next morning, when he left the house to go to work—when he raised the curved shape of his leather hand against the dusty purple sky to wave to me, I felt sure he would triumph because of it. Tears sprang into my eyes.

‘Give 'em hell!' I shouted.