The Sea House: A Novel (12 page)

So I was looking at the Reverend Ferguson. A dapper young man with pale eyes and a serious expression looked back at me. He wore a high, white collar band and a watch chain across his waistcoat. He looked serious and was holding a little black bible against his chest, as if affecting gravitas. His parting was remarkably neat, his hair oiled. But the most striking thing was that even from the faded photo, it was clear that Alexander Ferguson was very personable, with the kind of small, even features that can seem almost pretty in a man.

Either side of him stood a row of farm workers, the females to the left, and it wasn’t hard to guess that they all would have been in love with the Reverend in some way – even down to the old lady with the extraordinary bonnet.

I noticed that one girl was better dressed than the others, wearing a cotton frock rather than a rough skirt, more like a housemaid than a farm worker. Her hair was twisted up in a bun, frizzy wisps escaping. She looked ready to say something sharp.

On the other side, three big farm men stood bashful in front of the camera.

Was I looking at the faces of the baby’s parents among that little group?

Reluctantly, I put the photo back.

It was late afternoon when I headed back to find the others. With a sinking heart, I remembered it was Leaf’s turn to cook. We would be eating late then. Not, I hoped, more lentils with crunchy centres like bits of grit embedded in mush.

I scanned the high street and across to the car park by the wooden pier where the ferry docked. No one. Then I saw a row of three people sitting on the wall at the top of the harbour; in the middle, long fair hair blowing in the breeze. They were all eating chips.

And fish. They were definitely pulling bits off fried fish. I totted it up in my head. That would blow our budget for a couple of days.

I sat down on the wall. Michael handed me a newspaper parcel. I could feel the soft chips inside. Leaf beamed.

The oil was soaking through the paper, the heat rapidly leaving.

‘How much did this cost?’ I asked, clutching my bag in front of me like a defence.

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Leaf said, waving a chip at the sky. ‘It’s my treat. It won’t come out of the budget thingy.’

‘Thanks, Leaf,’ Michael said.

‘Nice one,’ echoed Jamie.

‘But the point is we’re supposed to all put in the same, take out the same. You can’t just make presents of meals, just because, because you can.’

‘Hey, don’t sweat the small stuff,’ Jamie said. ‘Leaf’s cool with it. Anyway, her dad’s loaded.’

Leaf looked confused and apologetic, shrugged her shoulders. ‘Really, don’t worry about it.’

She was daintily picking out the bits she liked. She handed the rest of her meal to Jamie, who polished it off.

I sat stabbing my chips with a wooden fork. They were almost cold.

‘Did anyone get tomato sauce?’

*   *   *

Later, I almost wished I’d never seen that photo. I woke in the dark and pictured those pale, silvery faces, those moth-coloured clothes. There was an odd smell in the room, like the mustiness of old garments. I lay restless and alert. No hope of going back to sleep.

I decided that there was no good reason why I shouldn’t go down, switch on the sensible kitchen light and make some hot milk.

But I didn’t get up. I had a ridiculous, shrinking fear that if I walked through the blackness I might feel another hand brush against mine. Something claustrophobic and anxious, making it hard to breathe the dark air.

It wasn’t meant to be like this.

When I was sixteen, the council put me in a bedsit. I never slept well in that bedsit – not that I ever slept soundly when I was in the children’s home; I used to look forward, so much, to getting out of that place.

My bedsit was on the third floor of a tall redbrick house. Late at night, I used to sit up in bed listening to people coming in: heavy footsteps running up and down the stairs; people shouting at each other; thumps. I sat watching the door handle, hoping the lock would hold, and listening, always listening. Sometimes I’d read or study all night just so I could stay awake.

As soon as it was light, I’d pull on my clothes and get out of the building to walk around the streets. I’d watch the milkman delivering bottles, the rubbish truck arriving, then I’d walk down to the greasy spoon on the high street and order strong tea, pour in a stream of sugar and hope no one would speak to me.

I used to imagine how it must feel, to lie down in your own home and feel safe. I’d peek into back-lit rooms at dusk, and pick out the paper lampshade from Habitat; the potted palms casting shadows on white walls; all the things I’d have in my own place one day and feel safe.

I turned my pillow over and thumped it into a better position, determined that I would sleep. But it wasn’t till round about four, when the room began to fill with light, that I finally let go of my vigilance and drifted off.

CHAPTER 12

Alexander

In the early hours of the morning I woke sweating from a nightmare so distasteful, I felt sullied by the very memory. I dreamed I was a large and corpulent animal without limbs, strenuously moving along the seashore in large, grub-like motions, and propelled forward by such intense animal instincts that I later blushed to recall them. I was making haste to where the females of the species waited, baying with their harsh cries.

Finding my passage barred by another male, I savaged the bull animal until the sands ran with blood. When I saw what I had done, I tried to form words to make the beast understand that I was in truth a man, trapped within the flesh of an animal, but my words came out as lowing, inarticulate noises. I had never experienced such isolation and despair.

The horror of that moment woke me. I threw back the bed sheets and stumbled in the darkness towards a faint line of dawn round the window. I pushed aside the curtain to see a landscape made of floating shadows and half-light.

I lit a candle and made my way down to my study. I began to read from St Anthony, but waking some hours later, I found the book still open at the same page. I could hear the sounds of Moira banking up the peat fires in the kitchen. She would shortly come in to lay the fire and she would not be pleased to see that I had been in my room without any heat – though I had a perfectly sturdy blanket to keep out the early morning chill, and I counted such deprivation as a beneficial discipline.

For though it made my eyes sore and weary, it was only by rising early each day that I renewed my daily hope to finally set out upon the path I so greatly desired, towards a mind and heart given wholly to God. But in spite of such vows, by close of each day all my efforts seemed to have been to undo those same resolutions. Surely, by now, I thought, after all my years of study, I might have trained myself in godly ways. And yet I saw no change in my nature, no evidence in my own heart that here was a man saved by grace – and how bitterly I saw that failure.

And now all my efforts were to publicly cast a doubtful light upon my own character. In speaking with Maggie Kintail, I realised that my family superstitions had become known to all my parishioners. And what had induced me to want to share my unseemly fables with Miss Marstone, knowing full well that she was too young to keep a confidence? It was as if she had the power to make me do things I would later regret, and I thought again of how she leaned on my arm, how her round cheek blushed with pleasure when I complimented her, and in a way that made me quite forget myself.

I had thus vowed to myself to not let this happen again. I had fasted and prayed for three days on the matter, until I was weary to the bone and in such ill humour that I did nothing but further prove my own unfitness.

And for three days Moira had been cooking her most delicious stews and banging plates of food in front of me, in spite of my express instructions to cancel all my meals.

‘If the grace of our Lord will do for the likes of a wretch like me,’ she scolded, ‘then I don’t see why you, a minister, should improve upon the Lord’s grace by near starving yourself to death with holiness.’

A tap on the door and Moira came in, stepping round the books and papers that covered my study floor. I shut my eyes so that she would think me napping, but she was too quick. A cluck of disapproval and I saw that she was planning not to speak to me to better demonstrate her displeasure, but as she stepped round the books her curiosity got the better of her and she had to ask me about a drawing in yesterday’s newspaper. I had left the newspaper open at a lithographic reproduction of a fossilised creature recently uncovered in Germany – a creature half bird and half reptile.

To me, this article had been the most wonderful news, arriving at a time when I had almost felt ready to abandon my project. For, although I now had six various accounts of sightings of merpeople taken from newspapers or court statements to magistrates, I had not one scrap of concrete evidence; no bone structure to examine; no skein of hair to touch with my hand; and no clue at all as to the precise texture of a skin or hide. I had nothing but a hypothesis based on stories and distant glimpses.

This new report in
The Times,
of the London museum’s latest acquisition, had set my heart racing with hope for my own studies; but Moira wrinkled her nose as she turned the page round to better follow the shape of the incredible bird reptile.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘It’s been christened Archaeopteryx.’

‘I can see that, sir, but what sort of bird is it? It looks like the leavings of a chicken, but with nasty claws to it.’

‘That,’ I said, ‘is exactly the creature that Mr Darwin predicted we would find one day. He postulated that there must have once been some creature with features halfway between those of a reptile and a bird – though at the time no evidence for such a creature had ever been found, and yet even as he sat writing those words, men in Bavaria were unearthing a new vein of fossil remains; within the year they had uncovered the bird-lizard.’

‘And the museum paid seven hundred pounds,’ said Moira, who by now had read through the article. ‘You could buy Avenbuidhe Castle twice over for that! It’s not even got a head.’

‘But look,’ I said, going to stand next to her, ‘it has wings, and feathers, and yet it has these spiny claws midway down the wings to kill prey. And see, it has a tail, a long bony tail more like a lizard than a bird. These, Moira, are the bones not only of a bird, but also of a true reptile, a link between the species.’

I traced for her the outline. The faint wing feathers seemed blurred with movement, as if caught on a photographic plate; a ghostly record of a day long ended.

She shuddered. ‘I’m glad that nasty thing isn’t flying in the skies around here. It’s bad enough having the terns dive in your hair if you disturb a nest in the dunes. I say we are well rid of it. Now, if you don’t mind me pointing it out, sir, but you’re white as a sheet and I’m going to fetch you your breakfast.’

Moira bustled back to the kitchen before I had the chance to tell her that I would abstain, and in truth, I was rather glad since my stomach was making sounds that agreed with her.

I sat with the newspaper across my lap, too weary to move. Darwin had had enough faith to predict this missing step in the process of transmutation, and in time the evidence had finally proved him right. But my own poor theories remained just that, nothing but faith and speculation. It seemed to me that I could make no further progress until I had settled in my own mind whether my sea creatures might be men evolved back into the sea, or some primordial type of subhuman, somewhat like the various families of higher primates.

This latter thought was harder to countenance. I pictured for a moment a creature with the face of a man, with the mind and speech of a man, but with no more of a soul than a crow or a lizard, a creature that might as readily tear you limb from limb as engage in conversation. Such speculations left me staring out towards the seaboard, caught among my thoughts, until I ate three eggs and a large bowl of brose with cream, Moira staying to watch me spoon down every mouthful – and I was deeply touched by the care she had taken to burn nothing. Then I must go to the church to say my offices.

Standing at the lectern in the morning sun, I read aloud from the allotted passage from Hebrews:

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

In solitary prayer, I pondered upon the soul and the spirit of a man, how they might differ in essence, but I pictured only shreds of luminous and transparent tissue, lodged within a clumsy scaffold of mortal bones.

Occupied with many thoughts, I walked down to the beaches beneath the manse. A mile, perhaps two miles, of pure white sand, the sea coming up in rollers of transparent glass, and reassuringly devoid of any sea creatures. The air was sharp with sea minerals, the blueness of the sky and mountains startling under the sunshine. After an hour briskly walking in such great beauty, I arrived home calm and with a feeling of well-being – a mood no doubt connected not only with the glory of Creation, but also with the oat brose and fried eggs.

And it had become clear to me as I walked, that the creature I sought must surely be as human as I: every encounter with mankind seemed to stress this fellow feeling, and report a shared ability to communicate. And if one were to add in the various stories and legends, then the sea people were able to also walk on land, and even interbreed with the rest of mankind.

I thus came home quite convinced that my next path of enquiry should be to further study the adapted anatomy of those land mammals returned to the sea: the cetaceans, the Phocidae and the Sirenia.

I also determined to better serve my parishioners. I understood from Moira that several displaced families had recently arrived from a nearby island. They had been sent to live along the eastern bays where conditions were already congested and harsh. I decided to see what could be done for them. And if what I heard from Moira about their sad circumstances were true, then I would respectfully enquire of Lord Marstone why more was not being done for those chased from their homes and now seeking refuge on his land in Finsbay.