The Sea House: A Novel (9 page)

And after the sun had set, throwing vermilion light across the wide sea, and faded quietly into grey and black night, then only the wind watched the steady stars with Ishbel McOdrum as she stepped out after a silent supper to listen to the waves.

The truth was that most people forgot that Ishbel might once have been married. She came to be counted as a man for the work she could do in one day; how many peat blocks she could cut with the curved spade; how many turfs she could throw up on the bank, stacking them to dry like rows of black hymn books stood up on the grass. So it was a great surprise to everyone when just at that age when most women know they will have no more children, or will never have children, Ishbel married and had a son.

Ishbel did not win her husband easily and she knew in her heart that she would have to struggle to keep him.

The first time she saw him was for a few brief minutes. He was some way out in the sea, beyond the Island of Scarp, floating half out of the water. Beneath the clear blue skin of the sea she espied his long fish-like tail, moving tremulously with the ebb of the water. His smooth chest was devoid of garments, his hair black and long. Ishbel’s heart began to hammer with a multitude of emotions. She had never thought to see one of the sea people with her own eyes, and she was full of disbelief and wonder. They watched each other with equal amounts of curiosity and she kept very still, afraid to break the spell, longing for him to come in closer so that she might see him better.

Suddenly, he began to propel himself towards her. Ishbel gave a scream of terror and with a flash of his long tail the Selkie immediately rolled and submerged. He reappeared twenty yards further out and began to swim away until the far islands hid him from her view.

Ishbel got no work done that day. She climbed to the top of Hushinish Point and cast her gaze around the half circle of the horizon, but she could see nothing clearly in the bright haze. She followed the line of the shore on foot, but saw only sleeping seals lying on the smaller islands, their forms blended against the rocks. Perhaps she saw him there. She could not tell.

Then she saw a man’s face rising up from the shining waters, but as the long grey profile turned and rolled in the sea, she surmised that it was nothing more than an old seal that snorted water from its nostrils. It melted away beneath the water.

She returned to her home pondering many things. She knew from the old stories that she had seen a Selkie, a creature half man and half seal by blood, from a race of beings that appeared but rarely in the islands, being descended from royalty – from the time when the King of Norway’s children were turned into seals by their stepmother and forced to live in the northern seas.

That night, a tremendous storm rose up from the Atlantic and tore at the grass roof of the cottage. Ishbel could hear the screams of the wind through the walls even though they were four feet thick. She was tormented at the thought of the seal man alone on the mountainous surf of the storm.

As soon as first light broke, Ishbel made her way down to the shore. The storm had worn itself out. Torn kelp lay along the beach like sodden brown rags. Jellyfish lay as sightless eyes. Dead birds slept on the white sand.

Then Ishbel saw the long fish tail of a Selkie, being lifted up and down by the low surf. Summoning all her courage, she waded in and pulled the empty skin ashore, finding it smooth and brown, the stiff skin heavy and oily with water. Ishbel looked up and down the beach for signs of the Selkie man himself, and with a leap of her stomach she saw him lying prostrate on the sand, his feet and legs half hidden behind a rock.

She ran across the beach, her feet sinking into the soft, white sand, and sick with grief because she thought she would find him dead. Placing a hand on his neck, she found that he was breathing still, but he was as cold as the Atlantic water.

Even in his human form, Ishbel could see that he was from a race of Selkies. His skin was smooth as seal skin and his eyes unnaturally long at the edges. His cheekbones were high and sloping and his black hair was as straight as seaweed in the water’s tide.

Ishbel raised him up in her arms. Staggering under his weight, she began to carry him to her croft. The seawater was lit by the early sun. The sky showed a bruised red over the agate mountains as the small figure carried her burden home across the sands.

In the croft, Ishbel laid the Selkie man on the bed that was built into the thick wall and lined with warm blankets. She built up a good fire in the hearth in the middle of the floor, and then, summoning all her courage, she peeled off the remains of his wet and slimy seal skin. She tended to his wounds and after wrapping him in every blanket she possessed, she held his head up to sip hot water and whisky.

The Selkie man awoke, gazing into the face of Ishbel McOdrum. She had removed her customary scarf and her long hair fell down over the skin of his chest. He took a strand of her hair between his fingers and raised it up so that it shone in the firelight like kelp on the water.

Ishbel nursed him for a week. She had never seen such a face and found his small, happy features most pleasing. His dark eyes were liquid and deep, and so very like the eyes of the seals that appeared in the bay.

Ishbel hid his Selkie skins. She rolled them up, even though they were stiff and heavy with oil. She hid them away at the back of the old stone barn built by her father in the high summer pastures.

Without his seal skins the Selkie was a man, and the first man to be aware that Ishbel was a woman. He had an uncanny way of sensing her feelings and was most courteous. She christened him Finlay and tried to teach him the names of things in Gaelic.

Ishbel hid him for another week but as he grew stronger and able to walk again, it was impossible to prevent him from going outside and down to the ocean. She fetched some of her father’s clothes for him. The woollen trousers fell in folds around his ankles and had to be cut short. He did not like the rough wool and scratched his arms and pulled a face, but he tolerated the garments in order to go down to his sea.

The Selkie man made straight for the shore and sat down near the hissing surf. Ishbel wondered that he could be friends with something that had all but killed him a few weeks before. The ocean around him was out to entice that morning with twenty shades of blue and green, but he sat and gazed far beyond, where the sea dipped over the curve of the earth, beyond where the boldest fishing boat had ever travelled – to a place where Ishbel could never follow him.

But he could not go back there. Ishbel had hidden away his Selkie skin and she meant to keep it hidden away.

Ishbel was not cruel to keep him. She knew then that the Selkie man loved her. He would sing her songs in a strange piercing voice that Ishbel knew were for her, and yet day after day he made his way back to the shore and sang quietly, sadly, to the sea. Ishbel would find him cold and stiff in the wind, and must pull him gently back to the croft.

The priest from St Columba’s chapel came to see Ishbel, dismayed to learn that she was sharing a house with a man not her husband. Ishbel recounted that he was a fisherman who had all but drowned and she had given him shelter. She said that they wished to be married.

Everyone was happy for Ishbel. After the wedding they danced to the pipes out on the machair grass and ate mutton and drank the
uisg a bhaig.

*   *   *

After a year of marriage, Ishbel McOdrum gave birth to a baby boy. He came into the world covered in smooth black hair like a tiny otter. Ishbel feared that the midwife would be afraid of such a child but the woman said he was a healthy infant and the hair would fall away. She had seen such a thing before.

As soon as he could walk, the boy was drawn towards water. Any jug of water in the house would be spilled and paddled in while her back was turned. He found every spring within a mile of their croft. But it was the sea that drew him most. He would stand at the small window after dark, watching the silver curves roll up the shore. If Ishbel did not bolt the door, he would disappear during the night and run down to play by the dark sea. Sometimes Ishbel could not find him. Then she must wake her husband who would find the child within minutes, by some instinct he shared with the boy.

It was good that Ishbel was a strong woman. On the days that her husband was mesmerised by the sea, no work was done by his hand. It was Ishbel who must see to the potato beds, fetch the sheep down, get water and prepare a meal. But she was used to hard work and simply waited until she could draw him back to her, warm him in her arms and restore him to the world.

Without warning, after four years of happiness together, he was gone. Yet his boat remained pulled up on the beach, so he could not be out at sea – at least not in the way of men.

He returned some days later, recounting that he had been up where the sheep were pastured in summer. Relieved to have him home once more, she did not reflect on how he had been walking up by the barn where she had hidden his Selkie skins, neatly folded in a wooden box.

The last months of winter were long and difficult. The wind roared into the bay, scouring the dried-out pastures. The cottage was blasted from all sides and seemed to rock as if tossing on the ocean. The ropes that held down the turf roof creaked in the storm. Ishbel would not let the child outside without holding onto him, so strongly did she feel the power of the gale trying to blow him down to the shore. The dark closed in early and stayed until late.

Ishbel’s husband lay in the box bed sleeping or staring into the smoky air. Sometimes he would sit close to the turf embers, rocking to and fro and singing his unearthly songs in a language that only his son could understand. Or he would carve from bone, tiny figures of seals and porpoises that he gave to the boy.

To Ishbel it was a scene of contentment. They had never been as close or as tender with each other. She held him secure by the ropes of her love, steadying him on course as he pushed through the waters of his past life, through his old memories, to stay with her.

She did not know that he had already found the seal skin hidden in the box. She did not know that it called to him each evening.

He did not want to wear the skins again. He did not want to leave. At night he would cover his ears with the blanket and sleep fitfully.

When spring came, he returned to the high pastures, thinking to mend the tears in his Selkie skin, out of a sense of thrift; but the Selkie skin was his own skin, and once it lay in his hand, the urge to wear it again became irresistible. He thought of floating on the water in his old life and found that he was drifting on the sea. He was no longer a man but a Selkie and he could not turn back.

His son heard his father’s cries from across the water and called out to Ishbel to hurry. She ran down to the shore and plunged into the waves with her arms held out and called and called for him to come back, but his eerie cries of farewell echoed across the bay. Then the small figure swam out towards the horizon, until they could see him no more.

Ishbel comforted her son. She told him to be brave, for his father might not return: the Selkie curse was strong and hard to break.

‘But he will return,’ said her son. ‘He cried out in a seal voice that one day he will return with my Selkie skin and take me out to sea with him.’

When she heard this, her heart went cold. With great haste, she gathered together her belongings in a blanket and they set off on a stony track to the middle of the island. She built with her own hands from the unforgiving stones a small house, and thus she stayed hidden away and landlocked. And in time her son married and became father to five sons of the McOdrum name.

*   *   *

When Ishbel was very old and her chestnut hair turned thin and silver, she began to long to go back to her cottage by the shore once more. So she walked home along the stony paths and found the roof timbers of her home broken and gaping. White sand had blown across the floor. The box bed in the wall was strewn with debris where once there had been blankets. She brushed the boards clean and lay down in the space where they had lain together, wrapping herself in the blanket that she wore as a cape.

She stayed in her cottage listening to the sea until her time came to go beneath the soft machair grass, where the dead may look out on the shining sea and feel the spray rising up over Hushinish Point. And on the night that she died, whales beached themselves on the shore and scores of seals were seen gathering together in the bay. When the morning came, they were gone.

CHAPTER 9

Ruth

There was a tremendous noise going on through the night, the sheep calling out in the dark, some bleats deep and glottal, some new and tentative.

‘It’s because it’s lambing season,’ said Michael, who was brought up near a farm. ‘It’s the mums and babies learning each other’s cries.’ He put the pillow over his head and went back to sleep. Around six I gave up and got dressed. It was almost light, the first signs that the days were starting to get longer.

In the half-finished sea room, I wrapped myself in a blanket, sat by the electric heater and read the story through once again. It was strange to think that Ferguson had also had a Selkie story in the family. It felt a bit like discovering a photo of some unknown relative in a dusty box in the attic.

The dawn brought pale gradations of light around the bay. I found myself staring out of the window towards Hushinish, over towards where Ishbel had waited and waited on the seashore for her seal husband. My hand was resting on my barely changed stomach. There was a flicker in my belly, wilful and fluid, like a tiny fish turning in water. I was stunned. It was the first time I’d been able to feel it moving.