We boys were down at the sea-rail now, grown-ups hurrying to lean along beside us, the whole town lining up to see. Younger men turned their faces aside, hiding embarrassed grins from each other. Older men watched, composed. The mams held their hands to their fraught faces; they spoke not a word, to the men or to each other, and their eyes didn’t leave Aggie for a moment.
Somehow she had reached the beach. Bloodied at knee and hip and elbow, she went at a limping run out across the stones. Now some men, my dad among them, took it into their heads to start down the stairs and catch her that way, but when she saw them she turned straight for the water, staggering, clumsy, as if she were transforming to seal right there, and might have to heave herself legless and armless the rest of the way.
‘Where’s her man?’ said someone. ‘Is he so gone in his grief he is letting her swim away?’
And then Aggie was a naked back and bottom in the middle of a white fan of water. The green-white froth passed over her, streaking and swallowing her blood, pasting her hair flat to her head. ‘So cold!’ moaned a woman behind me, but Aggie embraced the waves, swimming strongly; she was not clumsy there, and the cold did not bother her.
‘She wants to stay in the lee of the mole,’ said Prentice Meehan above me. ‘It’s dirty farther out.’
‘She is not out swimming for her health,’ said his wife. ‘She doesn’t want to stay anywhere.’
The mams in pursuit were stranded along the south mole, begging, waving their arms. The men had strung themselves out along the shifting brink of the water, trying to see her, seeing and calling out uselessly. I remembered Rab Wholeman that day at the inn, alone in his guilt, us shrinking away as if the very touch of him were poison. Here was a very different thing, everyone forcing forward, crying out help and worry, and still Aggie went, striking out as if none of us were here, labouring away through the cold sea.
‘She would rather drown,’ said Missus Meehan, with a mix of certainty and disbelief, into the little silence that had fallen on us. We could only watch Aggie’s smallness in the edge of the sea, beyond the waves now and crawling forth across the great wind-ploughed field of it, waking the green from its greyness with her splashings, drawing her messy white line out and out.
‘She’ll tire fast in that cold,’ a man whispered.
A howl of the wind turned into the howl of a man — ‘Aggie!’ — and Bannister ran out at the far end of the house-row.
‘He has her coat!’ It flapped around him; it looked as if it had blown against him by accident, and he was trying to fight free.
‘He’s too late wi’ that,’ said Whisky Jock.
Bannister lumbered on, woeful; Aggie was a dot in the water, a white haunch shining for a moment, a white foot splashing, and then nothing, hidden behind the glassy green upshelving of a wave.
Along the mole ran Bannister, quite thrown out of himself and his usual miseries, his mouth wide in his face like a bawling bab’s, his arms reaching. The wind and waves tore up his bellow and threw it at us in shreds, some strange animal’s cry, not a person’s, not a grown man’s.
Right out to the end he got, and still he yearned farther. He made to clamber down the end point.
‘Don’t be daft, man!’ said some man.
‘It’ll sweep him away!’ a woman said dreamily.
The sea jumped up and smacked the mole-end, a great fanfare of spray. Bannister staggered back, soaked. And there he stood a moment, clutching the coat and staring out to where Aggie came and went, came and went, bobbing and struggling now among the wilder waves, that came at her irregularly, and from every direction.
The sun poked a hole in the clouds, sent a bar through the spume and beginning rain, flung down a patch of light on the sea near the mole-end. Bannister threw the coat. It did not fly far, for it was heavy, and the wind was against him. It lumped out into the air and splatted on the water and was gone. Then it was there again, struggling, just as Aggie was, to stay afloat.
Our silence tightened at the rail — the coat and Aggie were far apart, and neither was swimming towards the other. The coat’s edge broke the surface; its whole shadow hung within a big sunlit wave like a hovering hawk. Aggie’s face showed, her mouth, her arm and breast, and then a wave crashed down, folding her into the sea. Even mad with grief, Bannister did not dive in. He stood a little way down from the mole-top, his legs bent and his hands red claws upon his knees, bellowing out to Aggie not to die.
She did not obey him. She lay slumped in the water when next we saw her; only her back showed, the water moving her black hair on it. The sun went away. Some of the mams wept, in their quiet way, not much more than a gasp and a sniff now and then. Men’s and mams’ and boys’ faces alike fixed on Aggie, unspeaking, unblinking.
The sea brought her in between the moles again. Through the grey rain-beginning, through the curling rows of green-grey waters, up and down it brought her, slowly. Mams ushered some of the littler boys away — Come, Dav. Come, Phillip. We stood at the rail unable to tear our eyes for more than a moment or two from the dead woman floating in.
‘She looks so calm now,’ whispered a mam. ‘Now she is not fighting.’
‘Free of suffering,’ said another.
‘Which is grand for her,’ some husband rumbled. ‘And for her lads?’ And the awfulness of that hit me. Yes, how could she have been so cruel? How could she be so sad, that she could be so cruel?
‘And look at Bannister.’ The man was folded around himself among the mole-rocks — we could see his shaking from here. Several of the mams were making their halting way up towards him, pausing to throw up their arms or embrace each other.
‘If only they could have kept that girl,’ breathed a mam.
‘It’s no good thinking like that,’ said Trotter Trumbell. ‘We’ve all of us given up daughters; that is just the way things are.’
‘It is not as if the girl-babs are dead,’ agreed Martin Dashwell.
Some of the mams lowered their heads and pulled their shawls down. Others only faced the sea and Aggie, their sorrow wearier, beyond the freshness of tears. Missus Cawdron saw me looking, and worrying for them; she sent me half a smile, warm and sad, her head tipped to one side.
‘Even with that girl she would have been miserable,’ said Garvis Marten boldly, and we all tightened away from him. ‘It’s their natural set of mind. And it’s only made worse by lads getting in where they shouldn’t, and coming home smelling of — ’
‘Enough, Marten,’ said Trotter sharply. ‘It doesn’t help anyone to belabour that.’
The waves brought Aggie back to almost exactly where she had gone in, and not three yards from where they had thrown up the coat. The men were all over the beach, the stones clacking and scraping under their feet like dogs mouthing bones. The mams broke away from us in pairs and groups along the sea-front; the ones who had run to stop Aggie now met and milled in with them; three women, out at the mole-end, were trying to persuade broken Bannister to come in. Someone had gone for Misskaella, and here she came hurrying along the far beach with one of her blankets in her arms, its corners trailing. Only boys were left along the rail.
‘It is his own fault,’ said James Starr offhandedly, ‘being so miserable about the daughter. Timmy told me, he’d sit to dinner and go to tears and mawk there while they ate around him. That’s no way for a man to behave.’
‘It is all their faults,’ said Raditch’s big brother Edward savagely, kicking at a rail-post. ‘Stealing our mams out of the sea in the first place.’
‘Oh, you cannot blame them for that,’ piped up little Thomas Davven beside me. He clutched himself and bowed and bent in the cold wind, without the shelter of the crowd any more. He nodded at Misskaella struggling up the dune onto the sea-front. ‘If you had to choose between women like her and our beautiful mams, which would you choose?’
‘It’s true, Ed, that is no fair choice,’ said Gordon Crockett.
Edward eyed Misskaella too. ‘Still,’ he said, through teeth
clamped tight against chattering. ‘Still, they never ought to’ve done it. They didn’t belong here. They belonged under the waves, and they still do.’
‘They belong with us, their lads,’ said Kit Cawdron hotly, and ran off to his mam so as not to hear more. I could feel my fellows around me wishing we were young enough to do that; instead we must stay near the bigger lads and pretend that their remarks did not upset us.
Against the green-grey of the sea and the mottle-grey of the stony beach, white Aggie glowed. So did the pale feet of the men preparing to pull her from the shallows. The water nosed and nudged her where she lay, as if it were proud of what it had done and wanted us to praise it. At its little distance, the coat lay, glossy and almost black, like a shadow that had fallen off her, curling and useless without her, kicked by the wavelets. The men and some of the mams now picked their ways across the beach, all caps and coats, boots and dark skirts, with a brighter shawl here and there. All were well-protected except Aggie; her nakedness lay at the centre of them, unembarrassed, the men now turning to it, now turning away.
Misskaella hurried across, a snarl of red and white hair above a filthy black coat, ashy handprints about the hips. The blanket draggled out either side of her, until she reached the sea-edge, and threw it out. It fell and covered Aggie, making her decent for the men to rescue her.
And now it ceased to bother me what the big boys or my fellows thought of me — I must see my mam, and she was not among these mams flowed down from the town to spectate. She was under her blanket in bed, and no cries from the street would have stirred her out of it.
I hurried up the hill, away from the crowd and the witch and the disaster. I did not care if Mam talked or wept or slept or hid from me under her seaweed; I wanted only to be in the room with her, to see the mound of her and know she was not drowned and naked, with all of Potshead looking on.
I let myself into the house, went in and sat by her window. My breath, which as I walked had turned ragged and sobbing, before long was soothed quiet, quieter than the wind outside, than the sea, rushing, pausing, falling on itself. Mam’s breathing was quieter still — I could not hear it, only see its rise and fall.
Now and again the sun broke through and lit the sea, and the ceiling swam with silver reflections. The furniture sat plain and solid in its places; the rug that I remembered Mam making — her twisting fingers with her singing face above — lay by the bed as it had always lain, as it always would. The table bore up her shells, and her stones that meant something to her, and her pieces of sea-glass, red and blue and powdery white, smoothed harmless, beaten to beautifulness by the sea. Looking on these things I ceased to think about the Bannisters, about the mams generally, and the men.
Mam woke, or became aware of me, and she turned to me suddenly out of her hair and blanket. One cheek was printed with hair-swirls and weed-weave and pillow-creases. She had not put on a face for me; there was a moment when she seemed not to even recognise me. And then she did. My mam was there again behind her eyes, although a long way in.
‘Is there anything I can do for you, Mam?’ I said — and I heard myself speak lightly, as if I were much younger and more innocent. I always spoke this way, I realised, in this room, to this blanketed Mam. ‘Can I make you some tea, nice and sweet? There are still some of those biscuits there, that Dad and I baked, remember?’ I could not seem to stop talking, offering, and in this silly voice.
She shook her head. ‘I am not hungry or thirsty, Daniel.’
‘I can rub your feet, perhaps. I could comb your hair — look at the mess of it.’
She shook her head again amid that mess, the black wild hair that I could not tell apart from the green-black woven weed. She smiled at me. ‘No, sweet,’ she said. ‘There is nothing I need, right now. I am quite comfortable.’
With a great sigh she sent herself back to sleep. I watched her, her words echoing gently in my head. She had lied to me; she had lied herself free of me. She was not comfortable — she was miserable. Like Aggie, like Amy Dressler, like all the mams, all the wives, she was more unhappy than I had ever been; they were unhappy beyond any unhappiness that a boy like me could imagine or fathom. And Dad was miserable too; all the dads were — for who could be happy with his wife in such a state?
The reason for all this distress about me was equally slippery and outsized to my mind. They belonged under the waves, and they still do, Edward had said. It had stung me, as it had stung Kit. How could my mam belong anywhere other than in our house, or at my back as I stepped out into the town, into the world? But of course it was true — she had told me often enough, hadn’t she? I come from the sea.
I could not mind Mam’s lying to me now. Indeed, I was grateful that unlike Aggie or Amy she strove to keep her sorrow from burdening me. My own lightness, my own cheer, was something of a lie too, was it not? My voice might take on that high, sweet, helpful tone easily, but that made it no less a pretence. Who did I hope to fool by it? I was unhappy, too — all of us boys were, seeing our mams so miserable. And though we combed our mams’ hairs and pointed out finches and brought cats and cups of tea, how could such tiny activities lift the weight of misery from our parents’ backs, and from our own? There is nothing you can do, Mam had said, often enough, to me and to Dad and to both of us embracing her together.
Who could do something, then? I sat back in the chair, my eyes on the sun-blotched sea, resting from the sight of my sad mam. The smell of the damp weed-blanket was warmer, cosier than the powerful sea-smell of the coats we lads had pushed among in Wholeman’s cupboard. It was the same smell, though, sure enough, and when I smelt it I could not help but think of them. Oh, it was a terrible thing we boys had done, was it not, in the light of Amy, in the light, now, of Aggie? How had we been so brave and frivolous as even to enter the same room as those coats, let alone take them down and put them on? They were not costumes; they were peeled-off parts of our mothers; without them, how could our mams be themselves, their real selves, their under-sea selves, the selves they were born into? They walked about on land with no protection, from the cold or from our dads falling in love with them, or from us boys needing them morning and night.
I remembered Aran standing shocked at the cupboard door, the padlock in his hand, and all of us staring at it. But it was not the padlock keeping the skins in that cupboard, it was what had hooked and locked it there in the first place: the whole island’s agreement. Let us take these coats, by force or by trickery, from their rightful owners, Rollrock men had decided, and forever keep them apart. They may have thought this would gain them their own happiness, but they might as well have vowed, Let us all stay miserable together — dads, mams and lads alike — to the ends of our days!
And all the men had agreed this — even a man as kind as my own dad. Against so many grown men and what they wanted, what hope did one boy have of bringing relief, of bringing maybe happiness, even!, to our poor mams, to our poor dads?
From the black tangle on the pillow came another sigh, and Mam’s voice: ‘Well, perhaps a cup of tea.’
I knew she did not want one, that she was saying so only to make me feel useful. Still I rose from my chair, ready to do her bidding, as eagerly as I’d always done. But when I spoke — ‘I will fetch it.’ — my voice was my own, not at all forced or sweetened.
Next day after school, with the boats gone out, I decided I would not head for home just yet, to sit oppressed by my mam’s sorrows another afternoon, with no Dad to busy about and keep cheerful for. I strolled instead down to the sea-front. It was quite sunless, and a raw wind gusted, strongly enough to knock me off balance now and then. I hardly met a soul along the way, and those I did were scurrying between one shelter and another. My town had become an entirely charmless and cheerless place, and the shadow of Aggie’s death hung like low cloud over it, or like sea-fog rolled into the streets.
I reached the harbour beach and leaned on the rail, watching the far waters heaped up grey. They seemed higher than my head, yet
by some miracle they did not tumble forward and drown me. Here, closer, the water threw itself onto the stones as if cross with them, and it was hard not to see again white Aggie and her black coat caught near her in the edge there. Free of suffering, that mam had said in the crowd of us, as if there were nothing else for Aggie on this island, no man who loved her and no boys depending on her, no beautiful birds, no laughter with her sisters, nothing that could make up for the pain of living out of the sea.
The wind made my ear ache, so I turned my face into it and plodded past the northern mole to where the larger sea stretched away, and the proper sandy beach, the dunes’ fine hairs blown back from their foreheads, opposite the lumpy water. The witches’ house was buried in among them somewhere, with Misskaella in it, and Trudle hardly less fearsome, and Trudle’s two wild daughters, who did not come to school and were not made to. I shivered at the thought of them, wild in that weird cottage. They could put an end to all our sorrows, those witches. They could refuse to bring wives out of the sea. They might terrify the men into agreeing that the coats be unlocked. Or could they magic them some way? I hardly knew what they were capable of. But if anyone could change the way marriage was done on Rollrock, those two women could.
But why would they? For it suited them, all the money they made from the bringing out and the blanket-knitting. Why would they be moved by a boy’s plea for his mother, to restore her to her home and happiness, to set things right for her? Misskaella had no heart at all, and was training Trudle up to have none either. She had not yet managed to shift Trudle’s interest from any full-grown man who wandered by, but sea-wives and children they were both pleased largely to ignore.
I stared again out to sea, to the horizon, and the sky bleached of all promise above it. But then in among the mole-rocks an arm lifted and dropped. I worked out a bit of black, which was hair flopping in the wind, and a pale spot that was boy-face. I didn’t care who it was; it was not a mam or a dad or a witch, and greeting this someone would bring me out of my downcast mood. I slithered down the sand to the beach, and walked along beside the mole-rocks to below him. It was Toddy Marten, seated in there where he could see forever and not be seen unless he chose. He swayed and he sang, wandering in his own head, swimming his own private ocean. Then he lifted something up from between his feet — ah, it was a spirit-flask — and drank from it.