I turned from the sunset, which was fading from its greatest glory. The men were legging each other up to the higher path so that they could cut up Totting Lane. They were quite a way from me, clambering shadows, laughing; they had forgotten me.
Prouts. The shells I had collected were faded dry on the paving stones before me. Why had I brought them all up? Why had I thought them so wonderful that I must collect and sort them and take them home? I waited until I could no longer hear the men’s voices over the slap and swish of wavelets down on the gravelly shore, and slowly I scraped all the shells chink-chiming together, and pushed the dull-coloured herd to the edge and then over; they tinkled to the stones and shells below, and instantly vanished among the others.
There came a long dark winter, and Rollrock lost many of its older folk. Among them went whichever men or women had been leaving the gifts for me, or arranging for them to be left. Which was it? Nothing came for me through those dark short days, so it could have been any of seven old men or women. Some of those had been kindly to me as they were to all children, and some’s faces had changed to watchfulness when they saw me, and others had been shut away as Nanny Prout had shut herself away, so that I hardly knew what they looked like.
Whoever it was, they had abandoned me, and I felt it sorely, for now I began to grow, up out of childhood and into a time of life when all the town, all of Rollrock, took a greater interest, not just in me, but in all the other rising young women about me, and they set us against each other as you set chickens at a market, comparing their feathers’ gloss and the brightness of their eye, their temperament and general breeding. The boys they watched too, for signs of fecklessness, but boys’ bodies and looks mattered less than did girls’, however much my sisters compared them one to another. The girls’ company had long had dull moments this way, but it was only as I grew towards marriageable age myself that I realized that if I did not join that marriage-conversation, there was nothing else left for me to do. I could not go out on the boats like the men, or run away to Cordlin and find a living there – what skill did I have to sell? But I hardly dared turn my mind to the kind of marriage I might make, for from the one time my sisters had shrieked to each other about my possible prospects, and from Mam and Dad’s uncomfortable silence on the matter – let alone the looks and jests that actual boys and men felt free to loose at me, out on the public street – I knew that I had little enough to offer. ‘Perhaps if you looked more cheerful,’ Mam would say hopelessly after a space of glumly regarding me. But I had seen my sisters going about smiling at nothing and tossing their hair. It was grotesque; I would have none of it. I was an unhappy pudding and I would not pretend otherwise. Why should I try to win the favour of one of those boys? If they had not grown up tormenting me, they had never stepped forward to prevent those who did. Even Bee’s anxiously listing the men who might be expected to take an interest in me – defective in brain or looks or manners, or aged beyond caring whether a wife had a fine face and figure – could not move me to attempt to improve myself, try different ways with my hair or affect an interest in the lives about me.
I could have done with a gift being left for me now and then, to single me out as favoured when all the world seemed intent on pointing out what I lacked. I looked forward sometimes to loosening the band upon my shoulder at night, just to remind myself of what I could see that others could not – but what consolation was that, to watch the essence of things in its dance-and-streaming, when I must always return to the flatter life and the silenter, where I was an object not of reverence or wonder but of scorn?
As I sat uncooperative, my brother and sisters turned from me and one by one took wing into their opportunities. Our Billy, first chance he got, upped and offed Rollrock. He sent us a gaudy card, of two flirtatious SPANISH FLAMENCO DANCERS, but the card was post-stamped from a port in France, not Spain. Out of that port, he said, he was working some ‘proper ships’. What kind of work he did not say, but it clearly was not fishing-boats he talked of; he surely thought himself too fine for that work.
Mam was even angrier now – she could not look on those flamenco dancers without distaste, and so that they would not smirk at us she propped the card on the dresser shelf with Billy’s scrawled message outward. Dad you could not mention Billy to; he would bluster away from you, full of unspeakable rage. I never saw him weep a tear of it, but his eyes would redden and blotch, should other men’s sons achieve things and please them. His mouth would pinch up and he would seek beyond the speaker’s shoulder for something unrelated to talk of.
I was glad to see Billy gone. He had changed from rambunctious, sneering boy to hulking, sulking young man; add a little drink and he would be spoiling for a fight, and if he could find no one to have it with he would bring himself home to snipe and ridicule us. And Mam at his side would take his part if any of us saw fit to answer him back. It was almost as if she had taken pleasure in his nastiness, as if he dealt out for her all the pain and insult she had not the courage to loose on us herself.
My sisters went on and on about the great tragedy and loss of our brother, among themselves and with Mam, seeming to enjoy making her weep and then exhibiting their own kindness consoling her. They knew nothing to support their imaginings of what Billy might be up to, not a thing – none of us except Dad had ever been off the island, or knew anything about the bigger world. But that did not stop them having opinions and proclaiming them, or hissing along every bit of gossip they collected.
I thought our family would stay this way forever, my sisters ignoring me except to tell me to straighten my posture and close my mouth and smile, for goodness’ sake!, Mam lining up with them against me and Dad striding among us with his eyes high and his chin stuck out, and Billy gone.
But a man came, a lawyer – or a beginning lawyer, some kind of under-lawyer yet. He day-tripped out to Rollrock from Cordlin, and he spotted Ann Jelly of all of them, and the moment his eye fell on her, she became something more than our sister, to our astonishment. She burst open, like a green bud into colour and petal-ruffle, and she smiled and laughed as she never had particularly before. She charmed us all, not just Skinny-Face Hurtle with his labouring syllables and his stiff collar propping up his head.
He wooed her mostly by letter, but he did cross to the island once or twice, and he joined us for an awkward dinner one Sunday.
‘Sit still, Misskaella!’ said Mam, though I was no more unsettled than any around that table, barring Ann Jelly herself, serene in her blossomed state with her lawyer-to-be by her side.
‘Misskaella, there’s an unusual name,’ said Skinny-Face. ‘What does it mean?’
Everyone looked at me surprised.
Ann Jelly said in charming puzzlement, ‘She of the execrable posture?’ and everyone laughed.
‘The sour-faced one,’ said Bee, and all had their mirth at that too.
Mam looked about at the swaying girls, at Dad who was going about his food and Mister Hurtle who looked upon me kindly as my face hotted up. ‘It’s a girl’s name for Michael,’ she said clearly, in her voice-for-visitors. ‘She is named for the archangel.’
‘I see,’ said Mister Hurtle, and nodded approvingly.
‘Aye, she looks like a Michael,’ said Lorel still laughing.
‘Lorelei,’ said Mam, as if to point up the girlishness of Lorel’s name, while I sat there slab-faced and mannish under my clunking mannish name, and the girls made a show of stifling their laughter around me.
When Ann Jelly and Mister Hurtle married, the wedding – which must be modest, said Dad, for I don’t want all the others expecting extravagance – was on Rollrock. And wasn’t Bee vexed that it was not her own! And wasn’t Ann Jelly delighted! Triumphant, she was, in the spring wind at the church door, and the apple-blossom petals blowing around them like snow, and Skinny-Face’s smile creaking on his face. His parents, fat on Cordlin butter and cakes, beamed and mouthed ‘quaint’ and ‘charming’ and ‘countrified’ and ‘fresh air’, and held themse
lves just a little apart from us, a little above us, under the trees in the garth during the wedding feast.
Then Ann Jelly was gone from us over the Strait, and Bee and Grassy and Lorel went worse than ever at each other, without her there to intervene between them.
But Bee was snatched up too, in time, by Thomas Bolt in his brief moment of half-handsomeness and hers of nearly-beauty, and she went up the hill and started turning out babs as fast as a granny turns out thud-cakes. And Grassy went to poor John Tinker and the same, bab after bab, and Lorel to the curate Breachley, who gave her no children, which was no surprise to anyone. And Tatty Anna married Joseph Coil and had one son and then the girl that killed her, so Lorel and Breachley took on those two and had children after all, whom Lorel never treated as anything other than a very great burden on her.
There was no reason to think I would do any better than Tatty or Grassy, and certainly no lawyer-in-the-making would whisk me away to the mainland. One by one all the marriageable boys claimed or were claimed by the girls who flirted or looked cheerful, or were only slender and unobjectionable, while I remained like one of the Skittles rocks, a crag in the midst of the moving sea, marking the points on which no sensible man, no man with any prospects, would compromise.
What men were left, my age and older, were either one-legged or mad, or they made the sign against me if I crossed their path, or they did not even see me. I wanted no husband if marriage meant one of these. In the secretest of my moods and the darkest of my nights, I thought of travelling to the mainland, and finding myself a husband there. But if no Rollrock man could look on me without scornful laughter or fear, surely all Cordlin could offer me was a larger pool of such tormenters?
And after Dad fell ill I was well and truly tied to home. It was more accident than illness; he was man one day and he woke up back to bab the next, and he never found word or step, or grasp, or control of his bodily functions again. Mam’s rages grew closer to the surface; where she had tutted and sighed and banged pots about, now she complained, and loudly – against Dad, against Billy, against her fate to live such a hard, dull life. She would unleash herself on me: ‘How fat you are getting! You are surely fatter than last summer. Are you eating your father’s food when I don’t look?’ She seemed unable to stop sometimes, about my untameable hair, my eyes almost swallowed up by my cheeks, my sour expression. She never remarked upon my harking back to that shameful ancestress, but it hovered there between us; I waited for her to use it to harangue me, but she never quite did. She only lamented at how I was to be a burden on her forever, I was so unmarriageable. Dad was the only bab I should ever care for, she said. Perhaps I was glad of his illness, was I? Perhaps I felt he gave me an excuse for being so useless to anyone else?
‘Useless, am I?’ I would say, if she pushed this too far. I would put aside Dad’s bowl and whip off my apron and go from the house with a slam. I would take a turn about the town, greeted by some and spat beside or skittered from by others. Or I would climb by field and fence to Whistle Top, and fill my teeth and hair with wind, my eyes with sea around three sides of me, rinsing the house’s cramped darkness and sickroom smells out of my head. I would feel the rage and shame of being a Prout – and of being this Prout particularly, the unmarried one, the odd one, the one who harked back.
Or I would visit the seals, dangling my legs from the cliff path and soothing myself on the sight of creatures who had no opinion of me. They soaked up the sun, or they lay in the wind and snow unbothered; they birthed their young in shameless messes and the birds cleaned up after them. The bull, carelessly ugly, fought off his rivals, returning to mate with one of these sacks of well-being, it hardly seemed to matter which.
I would watch them a long time. My irritations would fly off and I would find a patient alertness within me. I was not tempted at all to loosen my crossed bands and disturb them. I had seen deeply into them once; once was enough to know what sparkled inside them, what I might bring out from them when I grew big enough and brave enough. My time would come, I felt sure, and then Mam and the girls would be sorry.
When I returned, Dad would be inexpertly fed, and Mam would be silent but for a clash of pan, a crash of firewood. And I would have some days peace before she forgot again how much work I saved her, and recommenced complaining.
I hardly had leisure to think of what I held off from myself with the bands. I was too occupied keeping Mam and Dad’s house, and helping when Grassy or Bee lay in, or were ill, or their children were ill or their men. For a long time I seemed to be everyone’s but my own; I was like a broom or dishrag that anyone might pick up and use, and put aside without a thought when they were done with me.
During this time I saw many girls wed. I stood in the crowd outside the church waiting for bride and groom to emerge victorious, and I followed with everyone else as they proceeded to the feast. There was no reason why Tricky Makepeace’s wedding should set off my impatience; she was no relation of mine, and no particular enemy or friend. Neither was Jodrell Fence such an enviable catch, or the dress Tricky wore much finer a confection than most.
But that was the night I took flint and steel and went out, tiptoe through the town so as not to wake anyone, then out along the field road. The moon shone brightly – perhaps that had called me out? The air was as still as a held breath.
Down to the Crescent I went, to the seals, who were all the one silver under the moon, except for the bull, the king, who lay among his wives like spilled ink, and the babies, like dark droplets thrown off him throughout the herd.
I gathered driftwood and made a fire, and took off my clothes in the warmth of it, and stripped the crossed bands from myself, and down I went and called the king out from among the mothers.
His waking roar echoed around the Crescent rocks. He rose from the ruck and pitched himself through the bewildered mams towards me, right over some of them. His eyes rolled white in the moon, and his mouth was a paler splash within his dark head.
There with pups moiling and mewing around my ankles, and mams a-fret and a-waggle either side, I set my sights on the man-makings inside him. Like a swarm of bright insects they were, which I must waft and persuade towards his centre, even as he lurched and shivered and made his monstrous sound and blasted me with his fish-rot breath. This I did; this I learned to do in the doing of it, searching every corner of him, gathering every seed and spark. The full moon conjured and encouraged the light, and I threw and threw myself as one throws a net, and I drew each speck towards and into the man-shape at his centre. A head-blur parted from the body-blur; some limbs came good, splitting from the main shine. Then suddenly the man’s outline sharpened within the seal. Arms lifted from his sides, reached up, and hands pushed out through the mouth-hole and split the seal’s head-end apart.
The coat collapsed to the rock, and the shining man stepped out. The moon lit his lifted face, and I laughed as I fell in love with it, in simple accordance with the terms of the old charm. Then he lowered his gaze to me, and likewise I dazzled him – it was none of my doing, only a matter of proximity and timing and our two natures – and we were locked together.
He glanced about at the sea, at the cliffs, at the fire. ‘That is your home, up there?’ he said.
‘That is my fire.’ I admired his long lean legs, his man-parts and his narrow hips, the smooth-dented front of him, his broad chest and fine shoulders, and above all his face, so full of strength and loveliness and, most marvellous of all, so fixed on me, with not an ounce of ill will or amusement in his eyes, not the merest smudge of guile in his expression, not a hint of curl in his lip.
Then he bent, and I heard my own little shriek, the most girlish sound I had ever made, as he lifted me. He started out among the mothers and pups, commanding them aside in their own tongue. I clung to his smooth neck, breathing in the heady, salty warmth of his skin. A soundless wind poured up through the air around us. It should muffle everything, as crashing surf muffles voices on a beach, as surf-fume veils a headland
. But instead every wave-plash and seal-snuffle was clearer, every rock bulked out brighter-edged, and every touch was sharper or more tender than it ought to be.
He lowered me to stand by the fire. He put his arms – long, strong and lean – about me. I stood to my toes and he bent from his heights and we met in the middle very sweetly, I thought, very neatly. And then I thought the kiss had finished, but still he pressed me there, and when my mouth softened wondering at the surprise of that, oh! In he slipped his tongue a little way! I exclaimed against it. I tested and tasted him; I put up my own arms and held him down to me, and up his hot neck and into his slithering hair my fingers found their way, and in among his teeth my own tongue darted, and up and down our bodies we were fast together.
He let me go as gently as he’d taken me up, soft smaller kisses finishing off the larger. He pushed back the curls on my forehead that would never submit to being tied back. I fizzed and rushed with that kiss, quietly thundered to myself. How would I bring myself, at the end, to send all this back to the sea?
But why think of that? I sat to the rock, drawing him down with me. I pushed him back, and lay alongside him, quite unafraid. I roamed over him, exploring the hills and vales of him, the roads and towers, with my small, plump, work-red hands, wondering at all his different degrees of hairiness and smoothness, of warmth and chill, tying and loosing his hair, which was dark as night, slippery as water.
And here was a wonder, that a man so well-conformed himself should be so eager to embrace what I had always been told was a poorly made body, laughable, even disgusting. But I delighted him; he travelled my curves, weighed me in his hands, pressed me and gasped with me as I yielded. Open-faced he looked into me, his eyes empty of the scorn I was used to seeing, in women’s faces as well as men’s. Instead he was only another creature discovering skin, discovering forms of limbs, folds and fancies in the fire- and moonlight, all of them laughable, all gravely serious. He pushed the dampening hair back from my temples, and kissed me again with that wide, that white-teethed, that smiling-serious mouth.