The Visitor (12 page)

*

The work on the fishing quarter meant that several streets were closed. Looking over the wooden barrier erected close to Eileen's shop she saw a group of men bringing down a wall. She recognised most of them as local boys, some from Govenek. The figure nearest her wore a red shirt, the back of which was dark with sweat, but the front was white with stone dust. He turned round and looked at her. His face was powdered too, shell-white. He was walking towards her. ‘Mrs Tremain,' he said. Her stomach lurched. She tried to back away but there were people behind her. A young woman banged into Pearl's side with a shopping bag and her breath was knocked out of her. The keygrim was looming over her. It would drag her to the sea. It had hold of her arm. ‘Mrs Tremain?'

The shell slipped. A face appeared. Dark brown eyes she recognised. That crooked nose. The beard. It was Matthew Tiddy. She realised she'd been holding her breath and took a few big lungfuls of air before murmuring a hello. He stayed by her side, asked how she was keeping. He was a good lad, she had to give Mrs Tiddy that.

‘We're hard at it today,' Matthew said. ‘This wall was supposed to be down by last week.'

‘I can see,' she said. ‘Hot work, I should think. Why aren't you setting your pots? Weather like this, lobsters will be good.'

Matthew shrugged. Another man by the wall, cleaner-looking, in charge she guessed, signalled to Matthew to come back to work.

‘Wages are better,' Matthew said. ‘Railway company's given Pascoe good money for the labour, to get the streets widened before work starts on the palace. If we can find enough men.'

She nodded, then said, ‘You'd best get back.' He smiled and turned away, dusting the granite's powder from his hands. She watched for a minute or two more, then turned down an alleyway to get round the closed street. When she came out scaffolding leaned over and forced her into the middle of the crowds. She was carried along by their motion but couldn't remember where she was headed.

She slowed her pace and looked about her, coming to a halt in front of a gift shop. Hadn't this once been part of the coopers? She was certain she remembered hogsheads lined up here, by the door, waiting to be taken to the palace two streets away, but she couldn't get the map of the village clear in her head. Town, she corrected herself. It was changing, shifting its streets, closing off its alleys, but Pearl breathed deeply and could smell sawdust.

In the window of the gift shop a flotilla of model boats was riding a blue piece of cloth serving for the sea. They were crudely made. Even from the street Pearl could see the black paint didn't properly cover all the wood. A small sign was propped in front:
Morlanow seine boats
. That was pushing it. The toys' hulls were the right colour for seine boats but they had masts and the red sails of luggers.

Two boys came to the window, knocking Pearl out of the way to get close to the glass, pointing at the boats. She moved on. There was warmth at her temples again. Not a headache exactly, more like she was frowning and couldn't release the tension. It was the heat, the lack of air in the streets, the hammering from the building work.

As she neared the seafront dozens of gulls wheeled over the sea. They were disturbed by the clamour in town, she imagined, unable to get to the visitors that fed them or the chimney pots where some roosted. They were seen as a menace now, diving for the food in your hand and leaving their mess on the smart new benches. There was talk of thinning their numbers. Her father had told her that seagulls should never be driven away because they held the souls of lost sailors, letting them fly back across the world to their loved ones. They were much more pleasant than keygrims, even if they did snatch a bit here and there.

Pearl forced herself not to look at the birds and to keep walking, her head down. She came onto the seafront. Even now, after all this time, the space still appeared unexpectedly after the close confines of the streets. At the corner she saw Eileen's David touting for customers to take pleasure trips up the coast. He was short with sandy hair usually in need of a cut. He had on some smart trousers, new-looking, and some shiny boots too.

Below her, the bay's sand lay in ridges. Boats lounged, asleep in the midday sun with their tarpaulins pulled up like bedding. Behind them, the sea glimmered and the lighthouse stood tall beyond the far cliff, the sunlight catching the glass so the lamp appeared lit. At the other end of the seafront, scaffolding was climbing the walls of the only remaining pilchard palace. It was the first time she had seen it since Pascoe's scheme was announced.

In the best years, before the fish disappeared, there had been four palaces in Morlanow filled with fish and hurrying, tired women all through the summer and into autumn. The other three had been demolished or converted to flats many years since. The last remaining, owned by the Tillotsons and managed by the Master, was the largest, but even this had been empty for such a long time. Was that reason enough to make it a hotel? It was true, no pilchards had been netted in Morlanow's waters for years and many of the fishing families gave over their net lofts to the artists to use as studios even before the fish disappeared. When the artists began to thin, just as the fish had done, the holiday visitors took their place. Pearl could never blame those who turned over the lofts. The money from the rent was more than they would ever earn by fishing, and it was regular – there were no years when people came close to starving. Every family could count up their plots in the graveyard. By renting out the lofts the men were safe, and was it so wrong to be curled in bed while the wind raked up the waves?

Eileen had said that as the hotel was built, water pipes would be laid on to the whole town, and that the gas board was to connect all the houses still without a supply. And the hotel would bring work too. Just as when chapel was sold, there weren't many who would raise a fuss about the palace, though Jack thought it was a step too far. That wasn't a surprise though. He'd caused such trouble in the past when change had come. Nicholas would have understood. He looked ahead. He made you believe him; believe in all sorts of things.

Pearl walked to the palace and stopped opposite its thick walls. The strong shape appeared to be sagging under the tarpaulin. Scaffold poles pinched the sides like ticks on a dog. She wiped her eyes and could almost hear Nicholas telling her to pull herself together. It was only a building, after all. But it was more than that. It was everything that had happened inside its walls.

She leant against the seafront railings. The warmth at her temples grew hotter. There was burning across her forehead now. The sunlight was too bright. She closed her eyes against the sight of the palace and felt the heat travel to the back of her head, a lake of pain, able to slip and spread. The bustling sounds of the street faded away, replaced by snatches of song seeping up from the sand behind her.

The corn is in the shock,

And the fish are on the rock,

And the golden sun is gleaming on the Islands of the West;

I hear the huer's cry,

And I see the dappled sky,

And my heart is dead with sorrow for the lad I love the best.

It was her mother's voice. With her eyes closed Pearl could see her sore, red hands deep in nets, running them over her fingers to find the tears. It was a map, and a place to drown. Pearl's hands itched to draw the net over her own fingers, like a cat's cradle, the hemp rough as a cat's tongue. She would drag the sprawling weight across her arm so that it streaked a burn. The sting, hot and bright, would be comforting. It would coil her forearm and she imagined the twisted length around her, pulling her down.

She tried to open her eyes. After a moment when she felt the lids flutter without admitting any light she found she could see. Nothing had changed, nothing had moved. There was no song, only the chatter of the visitors and the noise of the workmen. She turned round to see the beach. There were plenty of people but her mother wasn't there. She quickly scanned the sand, trying to make her out in the crowds. She had been there, she
was
there. Pearl caught her breath. Her mother was dead. The loss was almost as great in that moment of remembering as the day her mother had died, at home in her bed, her thin hands clutching the bedding, asking again for Polly who had been gone years before that. Why were these things coming back to her in this way? What cruelty made the dead breathe and come singing for her on the seafront?

People continued walking along the road that separated her from the palace, clutching bags of shopping, ice creams, one or two with sketchbooks. Her hands were clamped onto the railings and as she tried to let go she felt that her chest was fired with bubbles and a coughing fit came. She managed the few steps back along the seafront to the slipway and went down onto the sand, then through the arch in the harbour wall, picking a path across heaps of fly-flecked seaweed and rubbish, onto the clean sand beyond. The drying field sloped up on her left. Skommow Bay and its wrecks were on the field's other side. With each pace away from the palace Pearl felt stronger.

The beach stretched on, the cliff at the far end standing sentry as if to say
no way out, no way past.
Pearl picked up the tide line she so habitually followed, a path that led nowhere.

Her mother was dead. That she knew for certain. She'd watched her go into the ground and her father too, once his body had been washed up. Polly, she'd heard in a letter, had been hit by a motor car while seeing the children to school, eight years after leaving Morlanow. She knew that each of them was gone and safely laid to rest. The curse was not knowing, thinking someone might come back. Nicholas could be a king with a court of women. He could be at sea on his own ship, standing proud at the tiller. He could be lying beneath the soil of No Man's Land. Despite the sun Pearl shivered but let that idea come. It hurt, but it was a way of getting on, of balancing out the other daydreams. It had been easier when she believed in a heaven for him to go to.

She wound her way with the tide line's trail of debris, all the wreckage the sea scattered along the beach. From the wall of her eye she spied another little tower of stones in the grass escaping from the drying field onto the sand. It was a different cairn, closer to the harbour wall than the first she had seen, and taller than the second by the cliffs. Blue stems of bugloss were poked in this one too. The sea would always claim the living, whether calling them to the cold, dark floor or to other places, far away. It rarely brought anyone home.

Eleven

Jack lent back in his chair. He was
wearing an old smock of her father's, worn to protect him from the sun when he spent days at sea, waiting for the pilchards to arrive. He'd be going out again soon, now the tide was turning, and she would lie awake and think of him there, bobbing in his boat, his hands itching to cast the net round that silver struggle. He was already imagining holding it, his hands curled, not wanting to let go.

She was rubbing his clenched hands the way her mother had rubbed her chest. It wasn't so much the action that eased pain, the movement of your hands, but the care you held in them. She was finding it hard to concentrate. The care was missing from her fingertips.

‘Here now, stop,' he said. ‘It won't be any use. The heat's too much.'

He could feel her lack of care. He knew. She should busy herself with something. There was a net to check. The tide was turning. Her father was getting ready to go. Why was he looking at her like that?

‘You must be tired,' he said.

‘Why must I?' He was going to tell her she couldn't go swimming and she wanted to go so badly. Nicholas was waiting for her by the harbour wall.

‘You were down in town,' he said. ‘I saw you, by the palace.'

He'd been watching her. Perhaps he'd seen her mother too. Perhaps he knew where she went. Pearl didn't like to ask though. Questions got her into trouble. The asking and the being asked. She'd been silent for so long.

‘They can't get the lorry down to the front,' he said, trying to uncurl his hands again. ‘Pascoe was blowing his top first thing this morning when he realised. Fool that he is. You'd think he'd know the width of the streets. He's been here all his life.'

Jack's voice swung in and out of quietness, an echo of an echo, thinning as Pearl tried to concentrate. The sight of the palace, wrapped in tarpaulin bandages, sat unshakeable in her thoughts. In its doorway was a shadow she didn't want to see.

‘Did you see it?' Jack's words turned the shadow to dust and the palace crumbled with it. The light had faded though the kitchen still swam with the day's warmth. There was a plate of food in front of her. A piece of potato was speared on her fork but the rest was untouched.

‘Did I see what?' she said. He was trying to trick her.

‘Did you see the lorry, stuck on the corner by Eileen's place?'

She shook her head and was clearer then. ‘I didn't hang about,' she said. ‘Had shopping to get in.'

She went to bed early but couldn't sleep. It was still so warm and September nearly over too. The month had run its course quickly. Time wasn't behaving as it should. Days were ducking past her, shying from their usual order so that as she looked back over the last week there were holes. Clocks didn't seem to be truthful. She decided to keep to the moon instead. She got out of bed and went to the window. The moon was still new, showing the barest sliver of white.