The Surface Breaks
“What elegance that girl has,” I hear a woman murmur as I close the door behind me. “She’s like a prima ballerina. Could she be from Russia, do you think?”
“We don’t know where she’s from,” Eleanor replies. “But we will find out.”
A threat, not a promise.
In the hallway, I stand at the bottom of the stairs to my bedroom, imagining climbing each step. My feet would collapse in on themselves, sawing through skin to show their bone-trophies to the world. I turn away. I turn away and I go in search of the relief. Down the steps, screaming soles against cold marble, and there it is. My sea.
Thank you, I whisper silently as I duck my toes in its waters. I have been so fearful of dying but it might be a relief, after all of this.
“Grace?” A voice from behind me. It is Oliver, and when he comes closer I see that his eyes are red-rimmed. I did not know that men were allowed to cry. It seems weak; womanly, Zale would no doubt say.
“What are you doing here?” Oliver sits beside me, banging his boots off the side of the steps. “Fuck, what happened to your feet?” he says, peering into the water. “Grace, are you okay? That looks awful. Shall I call the doctor? Are you in pain?”
I shake my head. I love that you worry about me, Oliver, but I am fine.
“Are you sure? That doesn’t look normal.”
I look away from him. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be normal, above or below the surface.
He shrugs. “Whatever you want, I guess.” We sit side by side, facing the ocean, neither of us saying a word. He is silent because he wishes to be, while I am bursting with words I cannot say. I feel as if they are filling every vein and artery, the alphabet carving itself into my bones, swirling letters across my body. It’s amazing how cavalier I was in relinquishing my voice; how little importance I gave it. Since I have been silenced, all I want is to be able to talk.
“It’s beautiful,” Oliver says, still staring at the view. I had never thought of the sea as being beautiful before. It had just been home, and more than that, it had been the place I wanted to escape. The sea meant Zale and his eyes on my body, and then his hands. It meant my father demanding I perform for his pleasure. It meant Cosima weeping into her pillow. Questions about my mother, and answers that would never be given, no matter how much I begged. And now I only have two weeks to figure it all out. I don’t want to die with my mother’s name frozen on my lips.
“We used to go out sailing all the time … before,” Oliver says. “My father loved to be on the water.”
Yes. Go on. You can trust me.
“You’d have liked Dad,” he says, running his hands up his bare arms as goosebumps form on them in the cold air. “He was funny, you know? And he always had time for me. It didn’t matter how busy he was, he would play games with me and tuck me in at night. Not like my mother. The only thing she’s ever cared about is that stupid company. She drove Dad away. None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for her.”
His gaze is distant, abstracted. I put my hand on his forearm and he jerks away. “Shit, Grace. You scared me.”
My touch scares him?
“I’m scared all the time now,” he says under his breath. “I haven’t even gone sailing since the accident; I’m too much of a fucking pussy. And I practically grew up on boats. Sailing is in my family, on both sides, even though it was Great-Granddad Blackwood who started the company. My mother changed the name to Carlisle when she and Dad got married, trying to make him feel included or some crap.” He juts his jaw out, like he’s spoiling for a fight. “Would have been better off actually spending some time with her family. That might have made Dad happier.”
I squeeze his arm, and he relaxes. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s just… I hate the fact I haven’t gone back out. My dad would be disappointed in me. We used to sail the boat together in all kinds of weather, and I never felt afraid then. Whatever was out there. I saw some strange things, Grace.”
I widen my eyes, even though I know more about what the true depths of the sea have to offer than he ever will. I think that he likes to explain things to me. I have found this to be true of most men.
“But the sea takes things from you too, no matter how beautiful it is,” he says. “It sucks people in and spits their bodies out. Dad. All my friends. I don’t know why I didn’t die too; I should have died that night.” You lived because of me, Oliver. I saved you. “It took her too,” he continues. “Jesus. I still can’t believe it.”
I lean my head on his shoulder, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “We weren’t even supposed to go out that day. Rupert said it wasn’t safe, he thought there would be a storm. Begged her not to go either, Viola told me. That just made her more determined.” He swallowed. “George wouldn’t go, not when he heard ‘storm’; he doesn’t exactly have sea-legs. But Viola,” Oliver’s voice cracks as he says her name and my heart cracks a little too. “She didn’t give a damn. She wanted to go out anyway. Don’t be so uptight, Oli, she said.” He rubs his hands against his eyes, calms himself before speaking again. “I’m sorry, Grace, I know this is a lot to dump on you. But you’re such a good listener.”
He looks at me and his eyes are soft and something inside me melts too. I think he’s going to claim my mouth with his again. I lean in, just a fraction. “And I’m sorry for kissing you the other night,” he says.
No. That’s not what he’s supposed to say. “It was wrong of me. You looked beautiful, and I – I got carried away, I guess. I’m sorry.” He groans. “I’m embarrassing you now. I’m embarrassing myself.” He watches me. “I wish I knew what you were thinking right now,” he says. “It would all be so much easier if you could talk.”
I watch him stand. He reaches down to ruffle my hair as if I am a child, or a pet. “Goodnight, Grace.”
He walks away from me. And whatever hope I had breaks inside of me.
Muirgen.
My spine straightens at the sound of my old name, as if on reflex.
Muirgen.
I push myself forward, as if to propel myself into the water, dive in to find whomever is calling my name. But I cannot do that, I realize. I would drown, these weak lungs howling for forgiveness. I have seen what becomes of humans who have tried to find mermaids.
Muirgen. Come back. We need you.
I think I see a hand stretching from the water, urging me to approach. Grandmother? Sorrow cuts through me, like a scythe through kelp.
I must run from the sea, before I give way to temptation and annihilate myself beneath the waves. My desire to taste salt is too strong.
I try to stand but I fall, the ground tearing my knees open, more blood spilled, washing the stone bright. And I cannot call for help. When the Sea Witch asked for my voice, I did not think of an eventuality where I would need to scream for someone to save me. I crawl up the steps, pulling these decaying legs with me. I can hear the sea behind me, someone calling me, my name; begging me to come home.
But how can I? It is no home for me any more.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In my dreams, I go to the sea again.
I was naked there but I wasn’t ashamed, not in the way the humans have taught me to be. Gaia, the water whispered, and I could hear its voice again. Gaia, come home.
I saw my sisters. My grandmother too, a shadow bleeding black around one eye as she sank beneath the surface, like she had forgotten how to float.
And I saw the Sea King. He was further out than the others, Zale by his side, an army of mer-men behind them. They were armed with spears, slain Rusalkas spiked upon them, their swollen eyes shot through with veins of scarlet. We are coming for you, my father said. I promise fire and fury the likes of which the human world has never seen. And I shall kill that man if he has dared to place one finger on the daughter of the Sea King.
No, I said and in the dream I could speak again. My voice was clear, strong. I had forgotten how good it sounded and I cannot believe how easily I allowed myself to be silenced. You cannot
harm Oliver.
She loves him, Father, Cosima cried.
Love? my father said. Do you know what I do to little mermaids who fall in love with humans? A baby herring scurried away from the shoal and my father didn’t break eye contact with me as he thrust the trident deep into the fish’s back. Be careful, my father said as he cracked its wriggling head off. And I watched it die.
I woke then, trying to call out. I clutched my throat, forgetting that I had lost my voice, that I will never be able to say my mother’s name ever again. I folded my knees into my body, pressing them against my heartbeat. I was sure I could hear it faltering inside my chest.
Something shifts after that night by the sea. Oliver becomes comfortable in my company again; he stops hiding from me. And as hope, oh that treacherous hope, rises in me again, I realize that I need to work harder if I am going to win his love in time.
I begin to smile at all of Oliver’s jokes, whether I understand them or not. I laugh with bright eyes, the way I see ladies at dinner do.
I wait by his door in the morning, holding a glass of fresh juice for him. “Thanks, doll,” he says, as if he can’t quite decide if I am a sister or a servant. Too pretty to be ignored, too silent to be enjoyed. Thus, I must become indispensable.
“Grace,” he says in surprise when he opens his bedroom door one morning and finds me waiting for him. I nod at the stairs. Will we go to breakfast together? I walk with him to the orangery, where Eleanor is detailing the seating plan for that night’s dinner. “No,” Oliver says when he sees the chart in her hands. “Grace is to be by my side.”
“But—”
“Mother, if you want me to attend this thing, then Grace will be sitting next to me. If not, I can easily find other ways to occupy my time. What will it be?”
Eleanor nods, but I see her jaw clench in a way I know means she is furious. She has always watched me, but I have begun to watch her in my turn. What do you know about my mother, Eleanor Carlisle? What do you know of a woman with hair as red as mine?
Oliver has allowed me to re-join his afternoon excursions, insisting that I accompany “the boys” to their parties. This time I don’t get tired, no matter how late they finish up.
“Does she always have to be here? She can’t stop staring at you, it’s creepy,” I overhear Rupert complaining as he and Oliver saddle their horses in the stables. “Besides, I thought this was a girl-free zone.”
“You never minded when Vi joined us,” Oliver says. “Anyway, Grace is different,” he continues when Rupert doesn’t respond. “She’s not like other girls.”
I know enough of this world to realize that this is a compliment, but it doesn’t appease my fears. Other girls might be high maintenance and demanding, insisting that their needs are as valid as Oliver’s are and should be treated as such, but the other girls can run and walk and dance for hours. Other girls can laugh. Other girls can talk; tell Oliver all that he needs to hear. I have to be better than the other girls if I am going to live.
Sleep is still elusive. Each night, the water calls me, promising me respite from these clamouring doubts. And each night, Oli and I find each other again on the beach.
“Fancy seeing you here,” he says, then starts talking immediately, as if he has been holding his breath all day. All his life, maybe.
“People said my father went crazy,” he says, “but he was just under immense pressure. My mother never gave him any peace.” He cracks his knuckles, one by one. “Always nagging him – how to dress, who to talk to. Look at these figures, these accounts. That bloody company. And now she’s doing the same to me, Grace. I don’t want anything to do with it – to obsess over numbers and forecasts and profits. I don’t know why she can’t just run the whole thing like she wants.” Because she can’t. They do not trust Eleanor because she is a woman. If I can see this, after so short a time, then why can’t Oli? But if this is the way it has always been, who am I to challenge it? And how could I? If I cannot speak, I suddenly realize, then I can change nothing.
“I just wish,” Oliver says, interrupting my thoughts, “that things would go back to the way they used to be, way back when. Before Dad’s accident.” I raise my brows into a question. “There was an accident,” he explains, his face so stark that it is hard to look upon. “Dad’s boat was wrecked; he was found thrown on a beach. It was a miracle, they said, that he was alive at all – but he was never the same after that. He wouldn’t take me out in the boat any more. He would go to the beach alone – back to the place where he was found, swimming out to sea and going further and further each time.” Oliver presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “And then he stopped,” Oliver says. “He took to his room, and I wasn’t allowed in there so I would sit outside. That’s all I can remember from then, the locked door and the smell of fresh paint from inside. I was only little at the time, I didn’t know what was going on. We should have kept him at home,” he mutters to himself. “I told her, Dad would have preferred to be at home but…” He sniffs back tears again, and I pretend that I haven’t noticed. “I would never have survived if it hadn’t been for George and Rupert,” he says. “And Viola.” Viola, Viola.
Another night, he tells me more about her. It’s a good thing, I tell myself, even though it hurts to hear him speak of her in such an intimate fashion. But it means he trusts me. “We were kids when we first met,” he says, lying on the ground. The sky seems so close tonight, as if you could fill your mouth with stars if you so desired. “Five, maybe six. It was around the time my father died, anyway. I needed to have some fun, you know?” He looks pleadingly at me, as if asking for my absolution. “And Viola was fun. She was always first to climb a tree, no matter how tall, or to take a dare to dive off the cliff edge, or to sneak out of the house when she had been punished. She was fearless. She was my best friend.”
Fury seethes in me, like scraps of smouldering coal. Did Viola give up her family for him? Her voice? Did she change her body in order to please him? Why must it always come back to Viola Gupta?
“Thank you,” Oliver says at the end of these conversations. “You are such a good listener. I can’t talk to anyone else about this.”
He trusts me, I tell myself. He confides in me. Daisy tells me what his valet says; that his nightmares have stopped, that he no longer calls out for Viola in his sleep. That has to be significant. It has to mean something.
And yet, he still does not kiss me.
We are by the sea again. Oliver staring at the water as he talks. I have never known anyone to talk so much. Black night stroking black sky, softly. No moon to show us the way.
“Here,” Oliver says, holding a seashell to my ear. A queen conch, I want to tell him when I see the peach and opal husk. Lobatus gigas. Unusual to find it in these waters.
“Listen,” he says, and I find the sound of home captured in its skull. “Can you hear that?” He takes it away, pressing it against his own ear and it is all I can do not to wrench it from his hands. “My father showed me that,” he says, throwing the seashell away from him, on to the sand. “Before he went mad.”
I listen to Oliver breathing, in and out. I want to hold him like a seashell and listen to his heart. Listen to his home. “And he did go mad, Grace,” Oliver says. “We used to find him here, in the middle of the night. Knee-deep in the water, screaming at the sea. Come back, he kept shouting. Come back.” Oliver allows the silence to blanket us both. Who was his father shouting for? Who had left him?
If I had my voice, what would I say to him now? Would Oliver even want to listen? Or does he just see me as a wishing well, a cavern that he can throw his words into, waiting till they hit the bottom?
“I miss him so much,” he says. “I miss all of them.” He stands, head thrown back to the sky. I used to look up, I want to tell him. I looked up because I thought it would be better here.
“But,” he says, and he holds out a hand to pull me up, before turning for the house, “perhaps it is finally time to let them go.”
br /> CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Oliver walks me to my bedroom, and I do not limp once. He cannot see me as anything less than perfect. Inside, I sit in the armchair by the window, a grey and green tweed shawl pulled up to my neck. Watching the waxing moon. It will be full soon. And then my time will be up.
The house is eerily quiet, as quiet as the night when I crept away from my father’s palace. I lean my forehead against the pane, breath fogging up the glass. I do not want to think of the time slipping through my fingers. I pull myself to standing, balancing on the sides of my feet so I shuffle forward like a crab into the corridor outside.
I can examine the photographs more intently now that there is no one here to catch me in the act. There are many to examine, most of them were presumably taken by Eleanor as it is just Oliver and his father in the frame. The exception is a photo of the couple on their wedding day; Eleanor beautiful in a simple slip dress, her hair a halo of tight curls around her head. She is gazing at her new husband with adoration, but he is laughing at a joke an unknown person has made, pointing at someone off camera. The famous Alexander Carlisle. He looks like Oliver; the same chiselled features, that glint of mischief in his eye. I wonder what he would think of me, were he still alive. Would he view me with misgiving, like Eleanor does? Or would he be more welcoming? My charms might be more persuasive with a man.
I pause outside Oliver’s room, pressing my ear against the wooden door. A loud rumbling sound comes from within, a scrape as a breath whistles through his nose. No difficulty in sleeping, as I have.
I walk on, through the house. It’s much more pleasant at this time at night, without the hustle and bustle of the servants and Oliver’s friends and Eleanor, watching me. Waiting for me to make a mistake. It can be very draining, pretending to be something you’re not. I limp on, moving further along this winding corridor than I have ever been before. At the very end, there is a turn to the left. The photographs have disappeared, the carpet becoming frayed, threadbare in patches. There is just a door ahead of me, the cream paint peeling off its wood as if scratched off by sharp fingernails. A musty smell is wafting from its heart and there is a recording playing, seemingly on repeat, a melancholy voice humming over the sound of waves crashing open on to the patient sand. I find myself inside then, as if against my own will, like a current has caught hold of me and is dragging me through the door.