The Visitor (20 page)

He would be old now. Older than her and Jack. A laugh slipped from Pearl's lips before she had a chance to catch it. She clamped a hand over her mouth. Jack shifted in his sleep but didn't wake. The thought of Nicholas at their age was ridiculous. If she tried to think of him with grey hair and skin as lined as Jack's, he appeared in her mind's eye as wearing fancy dress, as if the added years were pieces of a costume. He would throw them all off in an instant; the moment he smiled at her he would be the young man she knew best. Nicholas was preserved like that, playing out the same actions and uttering the same lines that he had all that time ago. Unlike Jack, he hadn't had the chance to age in front of her eyes, but in her memory Nicholas's repertoire was finite. Or rather, it had been, because since the move to
Wave Crest
she was remembering more, seeing him play new parts.

But the images surfacing in her mind weren't made up for actors on a stage. They must have happened or they wouldn't find their way inside her thoughts. She hadn't allowed herself to open the box they had been locked in until now, that was all. After what had happened, hiding her memories away was the only thing she could do. And now, somehow, the key had been turned, and things were escaping. Fighting in the palace. A trip to Skommow Bay. Swimming on a hot day. She had felt the burning sand on the soles of her feet. She had felt that heat. These feelings weren't imaginary, and nor were they deceitful. It was wickedness to deceive, although there were times life forced such acts on good people.

She pictured herself swimming. That would help her sleep, help her get rid of all this. She was in the sea off the beach below the drying field, underwater but not short of breath. She didn't have to breathe because her weak chest was better. The sea filled her veins, her lungs. Streams of light shone in the murky water, twisting into the shape of fish. The mesh of tails flapped in front of her eyes. She couldn't see where one body ended and another began. The room, even with the clarity of the moon, was fading, though not disappearing completely. It was as if someone was showing her a dulled photograph of a scene she knew well, then shaking it slightly from side to side. In the haze she was sure her mother was about to wake her to say that the fish had come, that she must get up. In a moment her boots would be set out in front of her and the lamp would be lit. There was its warmth, stealing up the side of her face, its light in her eyes.

Pearl felt her back lift from the bed sheet with the sway of the tide. Her shoulders rolled and she raised her arms so that her body was pulled further into the depths. She was aware of banks of darkness on the surface of the water above her, seine boats about to drop the great net. Then the mass of it was in the water, closing around her.

Nicholas came in at the window.

There was a draught as the sash was raised, although he lifted it without a sound. He brought the smell of seawater into the room. It was very cold suddenly though there was no breeze. She waited, her pulse loud in her ears. A floorboard creaked. Jack twitched in his sleep, reaching out as if he had dropped something. Pearl shifted away from him. She couldn't bear the thought of his hand finding her body at that moment. Another creak.

Her head began to ache and the pain moved across her skull. There was the sense of pressure on the room, of many hands pushing the ceiling from above. Cold forced shivers from every inch of her. Was Nicholas returning to her as an old man, shrunken and grey but still flesh, or as a keygrim, skinless and sour from years beneath the sea? Pearl kept her eyes closed. She couldn't bear to know, not yet.

He would sense her anger. Even though she had willed this moment to come, part of her rose up against him.
How dare you. How dare you make me feel this way.
He never thought of her, of how he shook everything inside her so that she felt as if all the fish hooks in Morlanow had tugged her in different directions. And there was George. The child had suffered too, was still suffering. Her son's eyes across the kitchen table, pleading with her to tell him of this man.

Her rage was greater now than it had been in years. It was heavy as a pressing stone, dragging her to the bottom of the sea where the weight of all the water of the world, all the water he had sailed away on, would fix her still.

She was already there. Her body stiffened and arched against the mattress. Her hands became claws and her tongue pooled uselessly at the side of her mouth. Her head held a furnace that roared in the silence of the room.

Longing to catch a glimpse she tried to look round the room but was unable to move her head. The moonlight still shone. She thought she could just make out a furring of black in the corner. There was no furniture there, just a patch of floor between the small table next to Jack's side of the bed and the window frame. A trick of the light perhaps, or maybe Jack had piled his discarded clothes in that space. But then the clump of shadow moved.

Two

She woke thick-headed and sore, as if she'd spent the night at sea, battered by waves. A muscle in her leg twitched against the mattress. The bedroom grew into solid aspects of itself. She felt the thinness of the room. The weight of expectation Nicholas had brought was gone. He had come to her only to leave. Her tears came fast and unchecked, pouring from her jaw line on to the pillow.

Rolling onto her side she was relieved to see that only Jack's shape was still pressed in to the sheet. She held her breath and listened to the house's melodies. Beneath its usual creaks and ticks there was silence. Jack must have already left for the seafront. Pearl lay there a moment, the bed cover and sheets twisted around her like nets piled in a loft. Heavy sobs beat against her ribs but she swallowed and swallowed until the tears stopped and her breath eased. If only it were as easy to rid herself of this old hurt.

If she didn't move, Nicholas might come back. There might be some part of him left. He might be hiding, having waited for Jack to go. She waited. There was nothing. The sense of him had gone.

It was late. Through the drawn curtains she could tell the sun was halfway up the sky. She felt trapped in the bed, bound up in the sheets and twisted at an awkward angle. She struggled from them and stood up, her bare feet tingling on the floorboards. Everything looked as it should. The room was the same. Pearl moved, her head aching, to the window. Her nightdress billowed around her as if trying to hold her back. She opened the curtains and stood in the square of light. This was where the creak had started from. This was where Nicholas had come in. She ran a hand over the boards then put her finger to her lips. Seawater.

He had come last night then. Here was proof. She had held faith and had been rewarded, though even without the seawater some long-hidden core of her knew for certain. Nicholas had felt so close and to feel something so strongly – it had to be real.

Her chest swelled then constricted. What if Jack found out? She put on her housecoat over her nightdress and went downstairs. In the hall hung the one mirror she and Jack owned. It was in an awkward place, too near the front door. It had come from her parents, and before that from Mammow, her father's mother. The gazes of so many women sharing her blood had fallen on this glass. Some days, Pearl found them looking back at her. Jack never looked at himself. Even shaving he went without the mirror and would shy away from it as he left the house.

Pearl hovered in the hallway, uncertain why she had come downstairs. Nicholas swam through her thoughts, sending them to ripples. Everything was blurring. The mirror drew her closer, promising to show her what was true and firm.

When Pearl stared in the cracked and spotted glass, the face that peered back was her mother's, but it was her mother had she lived longer. A broad forehead creased and wrinkled as if she was constantly thinking of difficult things. Frowns that hadn't been smoothed away but had been joined by others. Eyes the colour of stewed tea, almost lost in the shadows and yellowing darts beneath them. The lids were rimmed red and the skin around the sockets was puffy from crying. A small nose, a sharp little mouth; never a rosebud. She fussed with her hair. Long white strands, fluffy at the crown like a young gull's feathers, the rest as thick as horsehair. Pearl turned and turned about, watching this woman who was not her mother and yet not herself either.

Since the move there had been days when Pearl knew this old woman and felt the weight of her age in her own joints. But mostly the woman was a stranger and Pearl herself was lickety-spit, a lightning swimmer ready to dive away from this crotchety, tear-marked face looking back at her. Nicholas might not recognise her but she would always know him.

Three

Her screaming wakes her. The dream again. In it she's walking on the beach below the drying field, her feet cut and bleeding. She doesn't know where she's been or why she's there until she hears it. Her name, whispered in her ear. She can't stop walking towards the water's edge. There's something rising from the waves, something covered in weed and muck. It's reaching out to her. Its hand is a broken shell. She screams.

It's hard to be certain she's awake. The line between sleep and wakefulness isn't an honest one in the dream. Her throat is hoarse. Her back's slick with sweat and sticking to the all tossed about sheet. It could still be with her, that thing in the water. Though she knows what it is. Of course she knows.

The minutes pass. There's no voice calling her name. It's gone.

The house is empty. Her parents and Polly are at chapel. Pearl had a bad chest in the night, bad enough even to miss the service, but not so bad her mother would stay at home with her. She'll be praying for Pearl.

The cup on the floor by her bed is smashed, the wood around it damp. Her throat is dry as bone. She gets up to find a drink and her legs sway. She makes it to the top of the stairs then has to rest. Her chest is still bad though many people said she'd grow out of it. Old Mrs Pendeen was adamant it wouldn't trouble Pearl past sixteen yet here she is, twenty-one and worse than ever. Old Mrs Pendeen seems annoyed by this, as if Pearl hasn't tried hard enough to prove her right.

The house's only mirror hangs at the top of the stairs. Pearl looks a sight, but that's her usual self: still untidy and untucked, unable to shake off the little girl who became grubby as soon as she stepped outside. Her body has broken from that shell though and stretched itself thin, finding few curves to grace her. Today her face is flushed from coughing, the dream and the previous day's work. Her hands have become those of her mother's, sore and roughly musical when rubbed together, the skin split from days in the palace.

Pearl knows now that she's not beautiful. She has some sense of the way men look at women and can tell if a person is sweet on another. It doesn't trouble her – after all, nothing can be done – though she wonders if perhaps she might be thought pretty, if a person would take the time to look at her, to see past the redness of her eyes and the shadows in her face.

She stirs herself and sets off down the stairs, one at a time and with another rest halfway. Nicholas will call for her soon. She needs to be ready, her hair brushed and her cleanest skirt on, the only one that's not for best and that's not been worn to the palace. Not that he'll notice of course. Thankfully the water pail is close to the last stair. The water makes her gag at first. It tastes wrong. Of blood. Then she realises the blood is her own, caught up in her spit from the coughing. She sits on the bottom stair, her knees hunched into her stupid weak chest. Dust circles through the musty air. The dream comes back but she closes her eyes and shakes it away with thoughts of the coming day. She needs to be gone before her parents and Polly come home. She'll leave a note. Fresh air's the best thing after a coughing fit. Old Mrs Pendeen always says so. No one needs to know Pearl will have company on her walk and if they're seen and there's gossip then she can just say Nicholas was keeping an eye on her, offering her an arm. She needs looking after, doesn't she? And they're friends, that's all. Women mutter to her mother that it's not right the way Pearl still prefers to be with the boys, not seemly now that they're men. There's a shadow beneath the front door. He's here.

The streets are all but empty. She waits for him to take her arm, even coughs a little to suggest she might need it. He frowns, concerned, and takes her hand instead. But it's not just concern that makes him do it, and it's not like when he used to help her clamber over to the rock pools, when they launched model boats. It's different now. Surely he feels it? There's a something else between them, something that keeps her awake at night, makes her tongue-tied in front of him.

It's glorious to be out in the day like this, holding hands and all the gossips stuck inside chapel. The only people they see on their way to the beach are artists and they've been turning a blind eye since they first began stepping off the train. Miss Charles is long gone from Morlanow but there are more studios than when she ran the art school. There'll be more paintbrushes in lofts than nets, her father used to say when Pearl was a child. He would smile. It was a joke then, unlikely. But now it's true.

‘You know what's good for a bad chest?' Pearl says.

‘Someone else's?' Nicholas says, putting his hand to his own.

She blushes and is instantly cross with herself. Why can't she be as tart with the boys as Sarah Dray is, as Polly is, without this childishness coming on?