‘No, sir.’
‘No, Mister Grinny.’
‘We won’t. Promise.’
‘Even if you find it unlocked,’ he said. ‘Even if the door is swinging wide open, you will not go in. You will not lay a finger on your mams’ coats.’
‘Not a finger, sir.’ We shook our heads.
‘Shan,’ he said to his boy, ‘you go on home to your mam. All you boys, go on home. Look to your mams and see if they need aught. Bring in some coal. Make them a tea. Rub their poor feet. Or just sit and talk to them the way they like, about nice things, the spring, mebbe, or the fishing. Go home and do something nice for your mams, each lad of you. You’ve insulted them so, you must make up for it with them. Though they may not know it – and do not tell them, any of you, not a word – you must make amends for this, the way you made fun of them, Kit and Jakes, and the others of you for laughing – and even if you did none of that, just for going into that room and for touching!’
He stopped there, and raised his eyes, which had been steady on us boys. Until then I had not really thought how bad we’d been, being so caught up in the fun and fear of it. But at the sight of the cupboard door, firmly closed now, and the memory of what he had seen behind it, Mister Grinny’s face took on such wonderment, he looked hardly older than Kit beside him. Something of this expression I had seen now and again before, my dad looking to our mam in a quiet moment. But on Mister Grinny, who should control his face in front of boys not his son, the bright eyes and the open mouth made the skin on my head crawl, and his sudden silence sent such a shiver down me, I worried that my bladder might let go.
Then the men’s footsteps sounded in the hall, and we all crammed together, and Grinny was a grown-up again.
Baker, still flushed red, led Rab Wholeman and his shrewd-faced dad into our sight. Rab was a big boy, all but a man himself, but when his gaze fell on the latch without its padlock, all his colour went and his face sagged ancient; the light went right out of his eyes a moment there; he staggered some, though he did not quite fall.
‘Who has it?’ said Wholeman in a tight little voice, to all of us, his head swinging like a lighthouse lamp. The hair above my ears lifted under the sweep of his look. ‘Who has the lock?’
‘Me, Mist’r ’Oleman,’ whimpered Aran, and pushed forward, and held up the padlock in a shaking hand, which looked very small. Wholeman’s bigger one swiped the battered thing out of it. Aran flinched and stepped back in among us. Out the corner of my eye I saw Raditch touch his back, to tell him we felt for him.
But now, it seemed, we were not the ones so much at fault, for Grinny stood and turned, and Baker turned, and Wholeman’s lighthouse-beam swept around upon his son. Rab met all their attentions one by one, quaking smaller with each face. ‘I don’t … I can’t … how did this happen?’ he finished on a little wail. ‘I always lock after I put away the boxes! Always!’ And he began working up to sobbing.
Wholeman waved the padlock full in Rab’s face, struck him hard up the back of the head. Rab swayed there blinking and absorbing the blow. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s a terrible thing to have done.’
‘It is,’ said Wholeman, tightly, as if he must almost close off his throat if he were not to break out wildly shouting, if he were not to go mad with anger. He smacked the lock into Rab’s chest – the hook was askew on it, and would have dug in nastily. ‘Put it on,’ he said. ‘Make sure it’s clapped closed.’
Us lads shrank aside either way, and poor Rab walked through us, alone in his shame, bright red with it, his eyes swimming. His hands shook as he put the hasp over the loop, put the hook through it. A tear splashed on his wrist, silver in the window-light. We all heard the chink of the lock, and felt the relief the sound brought us, everything returned to the way it should be.
Wholeman sighed with it too, but then gathered himself up again as Rab faced him. He put out a finger and shook it slowly, glaring through his eyebrows at his son. ‘If ever, ever—’ And Baker at his elbow silently raged the same.
But Mister Grinny waved the finger down. ‘I think the lad realizes.’
Rab pushed past the older men, slammed out the back door.
‘There’s bottles need washing!’ Wholeman roared after him.
‘Let him collect himself, Storn,’ said Grinny.
They remembered us, then, Baker and Wholeman looking us over with dislike.
‘But do these lads realize?’ said Wholeman.
‘I’m sure they do,’ said Grinny, and I loved him in that moment for his calm voice and his uncongested face. ‘They’ll all go each to his mam now and please her somehow, and not let a word slip of this what’s happened today. Won’t you?’
‘Yes, Mister Grinny,’ we said subdued.
He opened the back door. We flowed out into the wind, each of us, like Rab, marooned in his own part of the guilt. We said no goodbyes, only cut one way or the other, some of us having to hurry past poor red-eyed Rab, his back to the wall out there, clutching his elbows and staring out stonily as if he saw none of us. Thinking of Grinny, thinking of Raditch, I reached up and touched Rab’s arm in passing. He did not lower his gaze; his chin crimped as if more tears were coming, and I scurried on past to save him more embarrassment.
That morning I had raced up to school and played footer to keep warm till the bell rang. Now we lined up in the cold spring wind.
‘Where are the Wright boys?’ said Mister Paste with a frown.
‘They are cousins, sir,’ someone called.
‘Oh.’ He turned away to take up his position at the door.
‘Cousins?’ I said blankly to Eric Cartney next to me, who was stamping and rubbing his arms against the cold.
‘Cousins of Tom Dressler.’
‘Why, what’s happened to him?’
‘Lost his wife. Don’t you know anything? All of Potshead knows.’
Lost his wife. I pictured Tom Dressler wandering the hills and beaches, calling, weeping. ‘Have they gone to help look?’
Eric screwed up his eyes and twitched his head at my stupidity.
‘You said he lost her,’ I protested.
Eric pushed his face at mine, so hard and pop-eyed I had to lean back. ‘She died!’ he said in a shouting whisper. ‘She hung herself from a kitchen beam!’
‘Everyone knows, Eric,’ Raditch said wearily over his shoulder.
‘Daniel here doesn’t,’ said Eric. ‘It has somehow managed to escape Daniel’s attention,’ he added hoity-toitily – but very quietly, because we were approaching Mister Paste, and it was Mister Paste whose accent he was imitating.
‘And it’s “hanged”, my dad says,’ said Jakes Trumbell behind us. ‘Not “hung”.’
Eric rounded on him. ‘Hanged or hung, don’t make her any less dead!’ But now we were right in front of Paste, who reached in and neatly clipped Eric’s ear.
Eric veered away scowling to his desk, and I went to mine, moving out of habit. Hung herself, hanged herself – neither made better sense. Hanging was for robbers and murderers; you had to have a scaffold and a priest and a man to put the hood on, didn’t you? How did you hang yourself? I didn’t see how that could be done, the mechanics of it. The question of why, I didn’t even know how to ask.
I had sat on the church fence just last summer and watched Amy Dressler walk out smiling on her new husband’s arm, in the beautiful wedding dress that Mam had worn, that all our mams had worn. And I had seen dead things – fish by the millions, seagulls going to pieces in the tide-wrack, Jodper’s cows and sheep freshly slaughtered, and one memorable time fourteen whales beached on the Six-Mile sands. I could put the bride next to the dead whale right enough, but I could not seem to combine them into the one thing. A live person become a dead thing, and by her own choice? It went against all the sense that I knew.
I went through the day unmoored from what I had known and believed, pushed to and fro by bewildered thoughts. I had not known that people could choose to end themselves. A new da
nger was abroad – who might take into their heads this senseless idea, if smiling Amy Dressler had been able to? Which other mam, weeping or only quietly enduring under her weed-blanket, might remove herself from us? Why should not, indeed, my own mam do it? For we had beams across our kitchen ceiling, too, if that was all that was needed.
The boats were in when school finished that day. Mam was not about when I reached home, but my dad was in his garden, digging over the beds for his spring planting. ‘Hup, day-up!’ he said when I came out the back door.
‘Missus Dressler,’ I said.
The near-smile fled his face. ‘It’s a very sad thing.’ He went back to slowly digging.
I ambled across the yard to him. ‘How would you do that, hang yourself?’
He looked me up and down. ‘Never you mind,’ he said eventually. ‘If you ever need to know, you will find a way. Your mam, though, she’s upset about it. They all are. All gone down commiserating.’ The spade huffed into the packed dirt; the lifted dirt broke up most satisfyingly. ‘And when she comes back, we won’t talk of this, do you hear me? We’ll not mention Dresslers, living or dead.’
I nodded and watched him work, and after a while I began to help, picking stones out of the turned earth and piling them up to one side. It seemed as good a way as any to hold my mind in place, just to move from stone to stone, and think about seeds and sprouts and growing things.
Mam came home while we were out there; we saw her at the kitchen window, but she did not wave to us or come out to greet us. When we went in for tea she was quieter than her usual quiet self, and around her eyes was puffy, but not red; she had wept today, but quite some hours ago. Dad was perhaps the tiniest bit fonder in his touches of her as he passed, but no one but me would have seen the difference from their usual evenings, except perhaps in the strength of wide-eyed watchfulness with which their son regarded them, fearful with what had happened outside their home this day, and itchily un certain what it might bring about tomorrow.
In the days when we ran about among our mams’ skirts, they took us with them when they gathered in this house and that. At first there would be greetings and tea and sitting upright and eyes everywhere. They would talk of their men and their men’s tempers; they would talk of us, and how we were coming on, how we ate and grew.
Then one of them would sigh and cross from table to armchair or settee or fireside stool, or even settle to the floor. All the mams’ movements would suddenly change, slowing and swaying, and their voices would lower from so bright and brittle, and someone might laugh low, too. As we ran in and out we would see more of them gather at the seated one, leaning on her or pulling her to lean on them. Hairs would be unpinned and fall, and combs brought out and combing begin, and there is nothing nicer than a mam’s face so free of care while her hair is being combed. When we were littler we would run in from our play and lie among them, patted and tutted over and our own hairs combed and compared, the differences in wave and redness. Sometimes we were allowed to comb theirs, but our arms were never long enough to do it as well as they did for each other, long slow silky sweeps from scalp to tips, comber and combed both dreamy.
Their talk would grow less proper, and have more sighs in it, and more seal: the high crooning, whistles and coughs of their attempts were always followed by laughter, or a shaking of the head. They loved when the littlest boys, learning to speak, would try these noises; nothing amused them better than a tiny trying to loose a bit of seal-song, and a mam singing back to him.
These gatherings were the only times we heard these songs, these attempts at seal-talk among the mams. When I was still quite small it occurred to me that as we grew into men, it must happen that we grew to not like the sounds, that men did not want to learn the sense behind them, and did not want to hear them senseless.
I remember lying with my mam in the sun on a rug on the sand at Six-Mile, and the thought coming out my mouth: ‘When I have a wife, I will let her speak seal in our house.’
‘Oh yes?’ she said, surprised. ‘Why will you do that, my Daniel?’
‘Because when wives talk seal they are happy, and I want my wife to be happy.’
I lay there pleased with myself for this wish, pleased with my own kindness uttering it to my mam, pleased with my plan for my future self, who would become a kind and admirable man. All was well with that day, the warmth of the sun and my mam and me on our island of blanket, other mams at a distance, other boys running and kicking up the water.
Mam turned towards me, propped her head on her hand. ‘My darling,’ she said softly, ‘if you want your wife to be happy, and to speak the seal-tongue truly, you will not take her as your wife.’
For a moment our conversation ceased to make sense. I frowned up at Mam, hands behind my head still, the little leisurely gentleman.
Then, ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I should leave her as a seal?’
She nodded. ‘Leave her as a seal,’ she almost whispered, as if testing the words in her own mouth.
I laughed at her solemn face with the sky behind it. ‘But who will cook my dinners and do my laundry? Who will sweep my house?’
She poked my middle. ‘Why, you could do all that your own self. You are a good little sweeper, very thorough.’
‘But who will be mam to my boys?’
‘A woman,’ she said. ‘A woman of the land, your own kind. She could give you girls as well, that woman. I hear they are a great comfort, daughters.’
I pitched myself at her, instantly jealous of those daughters she did not have, the comfort they did not bring. ‘Sons are a great comfort!’ I clung on and kissed her bossily, kissed away that solemn look and made her laugh at me, pushed all that talk of the future into the future where it belonged.
‘It’s true. They’re a great comfort!’ And looking in my urgent face she laughed some more. ‘My son particularly, my Daniel!’
And I was so occupied with obtaining these assurances, and pressing my need for them upon her, that it did not occur to me even to wonder, let alone to ask her, why at all, in the first place, she might require comforting.
I was idling outside Grinny’s place. He was ill in the armchair inside, and we were talking through his cracked-open window. It was the greyest darkest cold day, with lamps lit in most houses though it was barely past midday.
A white ghost went by down the hill, but running harder than any ghost would run – its feet slapped and its breath sobbed. By the time I looked there was only the back of her to see.
‘What!’ said Grinny and pushed the window wider, though his mam had forbidden it.
Her hair spilled down her back like black paint, her poor feet ran, all warped and bunioned from shoe-wearing, their soles grey with dirt.
‘That was Aggie Bannister,’ Grinny said in flat wonder.
‘Aggie Bannister?’ I said stupidly.
She floated away down the town, as pale in the dimness as a falling flare. She had been shut away from us for some time. Aran had hardly come out to play since that day up at Wholeman’s – or Timmy or Cornelius either, any Bannister boy. Bannister himself we’d barely seen since last spring when they’d had to put their girl-bab in the sea. He’d been mourning so hard, it was all he could do to fetch himself to the boats and back.
‘Follow! Go after her!’ said Grinny. ‘Come back and tell me!’ He waved me away and brought down the window, nodding, bright-eyed.
So down I ran, and other boys ran too. There were enough people out, coated and hatted and pinch-faced with cold, to make noise to bring out others – our running left a path of opened doors behind us, a path of What’s up? and Where are you lads off?
I didn’t slow to answer. Aggie ran around Low Corner. I thought she would slip and fall there, and I picked up speed. We slid into the corner ourselves; she had fallen just beyond. Men started towards her to help her, then did not know what to do because she was naked – one began to take off his coat. Their wives had hardly time to cry ‘Aggie! Oh!’ before Aggie blundered up, a
nd ran off again, shaken off course by the fall, nearly smacking into a house-front, like someone’s cow got out, not knowing about towns and how to pass through them.
She steadied and ran off. Some mams went to go after her, but their men stopped them. ‘It’s clear enough where she’s headed,’ said Robert Dunkling, pulling his wife by the hand to the head of Totting Lane. All the others, realizing his sense, went too – our little clump of boys poured ahead of them down Totting and Fishhead with windows opening and people crying out above, reached the cross lane and slipped down to the sea-front under the rail of it, staggered out staring to the south where Aggie had not yet appeared.
And then she had, a shining slim streak of person, determined, churning into the beginning rain. Several mams ran for her, never minding their husbands.
‘They’re not fast enough,’ said some man up on the ramp.
‘Aye, she’ll give ’em the slip easily.’
She was already across the front. She saw the mams, decided she would not make for the steps or they would catch her, began to clamber down among the boulders of the south mole.
‘Oh, ho!’
‘She’ll hurt herself in there. She’ll break herself – oh!’ as Aggie slipped and fell among the rocks.
‘But up she is, again. She’s bleeding.’
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.