‘I wasn’t saying anything out of turn, I was just . . .’
Monsieur Hélias glanced over his shoulder at Gaston. ‘It is not for everyone.’
Gaston flushed. He knew what people thought of his family, how they tattled about them.
Régis’s mother put her hand on her husband’s arm.
‘Joseph,’ she murmured.
From the set of his shoulders, Gaston realised Régis’s father was still angry, but he said nothing more. He clicked the reins and the trap jerked forward. Régis looked sideways at Gaston and shrugged, as if to apologise.
The rest of the journey passed in silence.
Gaston’s parents didn’t come.
After waiting up until nine o’clock, Monsieur and Mme Hélias finally went to bed, leaving the boys sitting by the fire and telling them not to be too late. The only sound was the ticking of the kitchen clock and the floorboards creaking upstairs. As soon as the house was quiet, Régis put down his book and gestured for Gaston to follow him.
‘Come on,’ he said in a whisper. ‘I’ll show you.’
‘But if my . . .’
He stopped, the look on his friend’s face making it clear Régis no more expected his father to show up now than he himself did.
‘But what if your parents wake up and find we’re not here?’ he said instead.
‘They won’t. They’re both up so early for the cows, they sleep like logs. Come on.’
The cold pinched at their cheeks as the boys made their way across the fields to the rocky gully that ran down to the beach of St Colomban.
The ground was damp, but they perched on the rocks beside the narrow stream for a while, without speaking. Listening to the sea rolling in between the headlands.
Then, suddenly, Régis’s head snapped up. He turned to Gaston, his eyes bright in the dark, his voice brimming with excitement.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Can you hear them?’
Gaston frowned. ‘Who do you mean?’
‘Them,’ Régis said, dropping his voice. ‘The dead who live beneath the sea.’
‘You can’t believe . . .’ he began, then stopped. Gaston could see his friend was serious; this wasn’t an old Halloween story.
Aware of Régis watching, he leaned forward and listened more intently. This time, above the slide and drag of the shingle, he could hear a low moaning sound. In the wind through the rocks, sculpted and pierced by countless tides, shrill voices, plaintive and lost. The nerves he’d felt standing in front of the whole school earlier came back, a sharp tug in the pit of his stomach.
‘What’s that noise?’ he whispered.
‘Did your parents never tell you the story?’
Gaston shook his head. They had, in truth, taught him next to nothing.
‘Many thousands of years ago, or so it’s said, there was a causeway there that led to an island. With every generation, with every high tide, it was eaten away little by little until, finally, there were only a few inhabitants left. They refused to go, though everyone here begged them to leave. Finally, when the highest of the spring tides came, the village was flooded and the island disappeared beneath the waves.’
Gaston stared, not sure what he was supposed to say.
‘That’s why there is a light beneath the water,’ Régis continued in the same, low voice. ‘They keep it burning for the drowned souls who live there. They eat limpets and blue mussels and seaweed and live in the caves with giant crabs. Fish swim around their heads and through their ribcages in great silver shoals.’
Gaston wanted to laugh, but the sound caught in his throat. He looked out to sea.
‘I can’t see a light,’ he said.
‘Over the year, it fades and goes out. That’s what happens tomorrow on the Feast of St Colomban: they light it once more so the drowned village can been seen.’
For a moment, Gaston was silent. ‘Your parents believe this old fisherwife’s tale?’
‘They talk about it when they think I’m not listening. It’s true.’ He paused. ‘I believe it too.’
The boys fell silent, locked in their own thoughts. Gaston gazed out over the sea, pretending he wasn’t looking for the glow of a lamp beneath the waves. He felt Régis had shared something important with him – even though it was a fairytale – and felt he ought to give something in return.
Gaston considered showing Régis the cave he’d discovered and the special things he had hidden there. Before he could suggest it, his friend was on his feet.
‘Come on,’ said Régis, ‘I’m cold. Let’s go back.’
Back in the farmhouse kitchen, the boys warmed themselves by the embers of the fire, eating bowls of rice pudding, then went to bed. When he slept, Gaston’s dreams were filled with creatures of the sea, blue and green and transparent white. The image of a single lamp fading beneath the waves.
Despite the awards ceremony the day before, there was school on Saturday morning as usual.
Régis seemed to have caught a chill. His face looked damp and slightly flushed. His mother kept rushing in and out, busy with the butter churns, and paid the boys little attention. Gaston felt uncomfortable, though. Monsieur Hélias hadn’t addressed a single word to him. He felt he was there on sufferance and when Monsieur Hélias did break his silence, it was to ask him whether his father was working today. Gaston felt even more certain he had outstayed his welcome.
The boys set off alone. Swaddled in rugs and scarves, Régis took the reins with a single horse harnessed in the trap. Once they were out of sight of the farmhouse, he threw off some of the woollens and drove on at a good lick. The trap clattered on the rutted path, bouncing and swinging towards the school.
From a distance, Gaston could see Mme Martin was standing at the gate and before they had even climbed down from the trap, she had beckoned for him to follow her.
He assumed it was something to do with the scholarship again, or more information about how it would be to be living away from home in a boarding school or about having to buy new books and pens, but she walked in silence down the corridor and her face was solemn.
She led him into an empty classroom and closed the door.
‘Sit down, Gaston,’ she said.
Quietly and gently, she told him that there had been an accident last night. His parents had both been killed outright. Their trap had come off the road and plunged down the bank into the old dew pond. Gaston knew neither of his parents could swim. No one knew why it had happened, she said, only that it had and he would have to be brave. There was nothing one can do except try to be strong and trust in providence. Could Gaston do that?
He heard the words, but could make no sense of them. He looked up into Mme Martin’s worried, sympathetic face, then asked her to say it again. She put her hand on his shoulder. Arrangements were being made, she reassured him. He wasn’t to worry about any of the practical things.
‘Would you like to be on your own?’ she asked. ‘The headmaster will allow you to sit in his office.’
Gaston shook his head. He would be all right.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. Mme Martin hesitated, then opened the door and he followed her back out into the corridor.
When he went into the playground, it was clear that the other children already knew. Régis was nowhere to be seen, so Gaston stood alone beneath the solitary pin parasol rolling a stone back and forth with his boot. When the bell rang and the school day began, he heard a girl in the class below talking about the accident and, unmistakably, the word ‘drunk’.
Everyone fell silent as he walked past.
Mme Martin was attentive. Watchful. He noticed she kept looking at him, during the lesson, to see if he was bearing up.
At the end of the morning, while the other children were filing out to go home, he stopped at her desk.
‘What should I do, Madame? Should I go home?’
Mme Martin shook her head. ‘I think the headmaster wants you to stay here until arrangements had been made. I’ll see if I can’t
find out.’
Remembering the whispering of the girls, the way everyone stopped talking, he was grateful to be allowed to stay inside.
Gaston lost himself in an adventure story by Jules Verne. He was surprised when one of the little children came by to announce the end of school, clanging the big handbell clutched in two small fists.
As the other children picked up their coats and put on their outdoor shoes, Mme Martin gestured to Gaston to stay where he was. He stood by the window into the yard and watched the other children separating and heading home. Then the playground was empty and the caretaker appeared with his rake and his wheelbarrow to tidy up the fallen leaves.
‘This evening, Monsieur and Madame Hélias have very kindly said you may stay another night with them. On Sunday we will speak to the curate and he will organise something. I understand you have no other relations.’
‘No.’
Mme Martin sighed. She shook her head and, for a moment, Gaston thought she was going to say something else of importance, but she didn’t.
‘I am so very sorry,’ she said. ‘But we will work something out in the end, I’m sure of it.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes,’ she echoed. ‘Well, until Monday.’
Régis’s horse was in the stable yard at the back of the tiny school. They hitched the trap, said goodbye to the caretaker and set out along the rough path back to the farm.
They didn’t say much. Régis was clearly tongue-tied, not sure what to say, and besides his cold was worse. It suited Gaston. In truth, he was numb. The news hadn’t really sunk in. Or perhaps it had, but he couldn’t really believe it. He hadn’t cried. He didn’t know if he was sad or just frightened about what was going to happen to him. As the cart bumped along, Gaston thought about all the times he’d sat on the smooth stone at the end of the path to his house, waiting for his parents to come home. Sometimes he sat out in the rain, craning for a glimpse of them on the narrow road, not knowing if they would come at all and dreading the smell of the bar on their breath and clothes, but hoping all the same.
Régis stopped the trap, pulling gently back on the reins. A sheep had strayed onto the path.
‘Could you get that animal out of the way? I’m not feeling very well.’
Gaston bit his lip. ‘Do you remember when I was the smallest boy in class?’
Régis rubbed his nose on his sleeve. ‘What?’
‘Even the girls were taller than me. They called me Little Gaston. Remember?’
Régis coughed. ‘I didn’t know you then. Look, I really don’t feel so good. The sooner you get that sheep out of the way, the sooner we’ll be home.’
With a spurt of irritation at the self-pity in his friend’s voice – he was the one who deserved sympathy, not Régis and another of his spluttering colds – Gaston jumped down from the cart. He chased the sheep out of the way, then looked up at his friend.
‘Come on then,’ said Régis, ‘let’s get back.’
Gaston shook his head. The breeze made the frayed bottoms of his trousers flap about his ankles.
‘You go. I don’t want to talk to anybody.’
‘I’ll get into trouble.’
‘I’ll only be in the way. They’ll be pleased I’m not with you.’
‘I can’t leave you. Mme Martin said.’
Gaston shrugged. ‘Tell them I made you. You couldn’t stop me.’
The two boys stared at each other, then Régis nodded.
‘All right,’ he said. After a pause, he added: ‘I’m sorry. I mean, I know they weren’t . . . well, they were still your parents.’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t be long.’
‘I won’t. You go.’
Régis clicked his tongue and slapped the reins across the horse’s flank, then the axles rumbled as the trap pulled away into the November afternoon.
Gaston waited until his friend was out of sight, then struck out across the fields and along the coast to where the gulley ran down to the beach. When he drew close, he saw bundles of hazel twigs set ready for the Festival of St Colomban that night. He didn’t care about that. He just wanted somewhere to sit on his own for an hour or two. He carefully picked his way down towards a place in the rocks where a shallow cave had eaten into the cliff face. He went as deep into the calm gloom as he could and sat very still, his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms around his knees. Outside, the drizzle began to fall and the sky was stormy. Gaston’s eyes clouded over and he wondered how different life would be now he was completely alone.
When Gaston awoke, at first he had no idea where he was. He was lying on his side, using his right arm for a pillow. It was dark now, but he realised he wasn’t particularly cold.
He yawned, stretched, then realised he was hungry. He hoped there would be a good dinner at Régis’s house. Then, he remembered. First, about his parents and the accident. Then, coming hard on its heels, that tonight it was the Feast of St Colomban so there would more than likely be no supper.
Gaston felt with his hands across the floor of the cave. He found the niche in the wall – a natural rupture in the rock – where he had secreted a few special things: the skull of a pheasant picked clean by birds and insects, a bone so big that it must have come from the carcass of some great whale. He knew them by touch and they comforted him. There was also a beautifully built nest containing three speckled eggs from the cliff. It was Régis who’d persuaded Gaston to climb down the cliff face and steal them, even though the curate had visited their classroom to explain that the roosts were protected by law and should not be disturbed.
Outside the cave, Gaston could now hear the waves and the wind beginning their night-time complaint. The sound, echoing gently about him in the cave, sounding more like human voices now. He rubbed his hands across his face. It reminded him of how his grandfather used to stroke his brow with his hard fisherman’s hands, dried out by salt and wind. They had been happy then. But then he died and his parents, rather than living as they had before, spent the inheritance on drink and visits to the town. Gaston imagined his own hands hardened by toil and wondered if the same thing would happen to his heart.
A trick of the tide brought a wave crashing in through the entrance to the cave. The water seemed iridescent, bringing light into the hollow, illuminating the rock like a wavering white flame. Gaston sprang to his feet, suddenly frightened. He tucked his shirt into his trousers, doing up his father’s patched summer jacket to the throat, placed his treasures back in the niche in the rock and went outside. He didn’t want to be trapped by the tide. He didn’t want to put anybody out and he didn’t want Régis to be in trouble for not having taken care of him.
The sight that awaited him drove all domestic thoughts from his mind. The sea seemed turned to glass, smooth as a millpond without a ruck or ripple on its surface. Even the edge of the surf was still, like a wavering line drawn in chalk across the wet sand. The air was tense and still with no sound of wind.
He had never known the sea to behave in this way.
There was a noise from the path above. Gaston stepped back into the shadows and stared up. He saw a line of men and women, all adults, walking in silent and single file down the gulley towards the beach. In the strange, flat light of the glistening surface of the sea, he saw each carried one of the tight bundles of hazel under their arms.
As he watched, they stacked them in a pile, twice the height of a man, and then formed a semicircle behind it, facing the shore. There were perhaps twenty-five of them, each wrapped in dark cloaks with deep hoods.
Then, as if there had been some signal, the water began to break and to shudder. Gaston peered out into the flickering darkness and saw the sea was now starting to shift and slip and slide. Something was emerging from the waves, a human form walking slowly but purposefully up onto the beach. The shape – it was impossible to tell whether man or woman – was wrapped in a cloak that seemed to be woven entirely from dancing ribbons of flame.
As the first figure
broke through the shallows, another followed, then another, each trailing seaweed from their ankles. They dripped with brine that hissed and spat and billowed up about their faces in a mask of steam. And still they came, all striding with the same steady, purposeful gait, until some fifty or sixty of them were standing on the beach, treading from foot to foot, marching on the spot, turning this way and that. They began to murmur, their plaintive sound an echo of the sea and the wind on the shingle, their voices growing louder and louder.
He glanced at those who had lit the bonfire on the far side of the semicircle, not sure if they too could see these ancient inhabitants of the drowned village or if he was the only one.
He knew he should remain hidden, but he could not help himself. He felt drawn to them. The unexpected movement attracted their attention. Six or seven of the drowned figures turned towards him. At first, they were still. Then they were floating across the sand, holding out their hands. Gaston stepped back. They smelt like last week’s catch trampled in the bottom of the boat. They smelt of death, and yet Gaston was still drawn. He could feel the warmth of the flames that seemed to engulf them. Then thin fingers were gripping his wrists and his elbows and his neck and pulling him in to the heart of the throng.
Gaston knew that he should be terrified, but instead he felt welcomed, weightless and supported, as the creatures carried him up the beach to the bonfire. Immediately, all movement ceased. Gaston hung suspended between two worlds. He could move neither forward nor back. And he somehow knew that the visitors from beneath the sea were waiting for some kind of signal.
Could the villagers see him? Could they see the ghost women and men who had come, warmed by the light of the bonfire?
The first chime of midnight sounded. Gaston’s sense of calm started to desert him. The wailing started to build in volume once more as six of the drowned hauled their flaming cloaks from their shoulders and threw them onto the stack of burning hazel. Immediately, they caught and sent sparks of white and green shooting through the flames. A second chime, and others stepped forward: twelve of the creatures, seeming to shudder and tremble with the memory of the moment at which the waves closed over their head.