The Visitor (25 page)

Jack's light is joined by another two weaving out of the mist. Pearl strains forward to make out who they are: the Pengelley brothers, Stephen and James. The three men have a brief conversation though they speak too low for Pearl to hear, before they climb the cliff path. She follows at a safe distance, her feet quietly crunching along the wet sand. When she reaches the point where she and Nicholas are to meet she stops again and looks round, but there's no sign of him. She looks up at the moving lights and then to the cliff top. A lamp burns in the huer's hut.

Pearl jumps at the sound of feet on sand behind her. Nicholas stands grinning. ‘What are you hiding down here for, limpet-legs?' he says.

‘Shh!' Pearl points to the lights. ‘It's Jack, with the Pengelley boys. I think they're going to the hut.'

His smile disappears. ‘More nonsense about Sunday fishing. Let them scheme and pray for our souls. There's men on to them. I heard from the Master. They're going to put a stop to whatever Jack's planning.'

Pearl feels a load she wasn't aware she was carrying lift from her shoulders. The problem with the east coasters will die away. Things will go back to how they were. Nicholas will be welcome at home again. She brightens her tone. ‘Well, I've come out in this mist. What did you want to show me?'

He gestures for her to follow him down the sand, towards the towering bulk of the cliff. Jack and the Pengelleys are far enough up the cliff path now that they won't hear them. Pearl peers into the deeper darkness of the cliff's recesses but can't see anything. Nicholas walks forward and appears to take hold of a layer of black and pull it aside. A little red boat sits on the sand, her oars neatly laid inside and a sail lying in her bows. Nicholas throws aside the tarpaulin that had melted so well into the cliff.

‘What do you think?' he says proudly.

‘Is she yours?'

‘She is. Bought her myself. Not got a name yet but I thought you could help me with that. I've no talent for such things.'

Pearl runs a hand across the boat's newly painted side. ‘She's lovely, but why did you want a boat? You could go out in your father's. And anyway I thought you had no truck with fishing.'

Nicholas climbs inside and sits on the plank seat, facing the sea. ‘I don't. Fancied seeing a bit more of the world.'

Pearl laughs. ‘In this little thing? You'd not get much further than Govenek. And why is she over here instead of by the harbour wall?'

He fiddles with the oars. ‘I wasn't sure she'd be all right there, the ways things are. All this talk.'

Pearl climbs in alongside him. They sit close to touching on the narrow seat. Nicholas suddenly seems weary. His boyishness has left him, his cheerful eagerness too.

‘Don't you ever wish you could just sail away from here, leave all this behind?' he asks without looking at her.

Pearl thinks of the advertisements pasted on the seafront, of Polly's crumpled piece of paper. ‘I do wish it,' she says. ‘Sometimes. But then I think of what it would mean to leave. Of saying goodbye. I don't know how I could do it.'

‘We could go anywhere,' Nicholas says.

Pearl's stomach flips at that: ‘we'. She can't speak, though she knows that this is the time to do so. But she doesn't need to. Nicholas takes her hand and holds it in his lap. He looks at it, frowning, like he's not seen it before and it's some marvel. She doesn't move, hopes he can't feel the tremble running through her body. She doesn't want to ruin this, or, if this is the closest she will get to knowing that he wants her, to rush the moment to its ending. If this is all she has then it has to last and last. It has to sustain her through the emptiness of the nights to come when even the hope that he loves her is gone. Nicholas runs a finger over her knuckle, backwards and forwards. Still she doesn't move. He leans forwards and rubs his cheek against her hand in a way that reminds her of an animal. His lips graze her skin. He presses them, hard, against the bones of her hand. He breathes in the smell of her. She lets her other hand rest, gently, on his head. His hair is soft, feathery. They remain still, then he says, speaking into her hand so that she feels the vibrations of his words pulse through her, ‘Where shall we go?'

Ten

The door handle was cool in her palm. Pearl swept her fingers over the shape which was at once familiar and strange, half recognising the spots of discolouration that came from the salted air eating through the metal. She knew she had to put her mind to this handle. There was something she had to hurry to do but she couldn't catch on what that was. All she wanted was to lie back in a little red boat with her eyes closed, not having to think about anything other than the sea beneath her and Nicholas beside her.

She came back to herself with a shudder. It was the front door handle of the new house. She was outside
Wave Crest
and the treacherous light of dawn was baring everything.

Nicholas put his hand to Pearl's cheek to wipe her tears but the hand was too small and the knuckles too raised in the fragile skin. The warm pressure at her temples came again. The hand was her own. Nicholas was gone.

She pawed the tangled hair from her eyes. Jack would be awake soon. Getting indoors and back to bed, that was the important thing. She had to keep ahead of him, and ahead of the stalking widows who were ill-wishing her days so that parts of them vanished.

Pearl opened the door and crept into the hall. As she climbed the stairs each one seemed desperate to give her away. She slipped into the bedroom. Jack lay on his back with his arms flung above his head, the bedclothes bunched at his feet. Pulling the bedding back over him, she saw that his face was ashen, beads of sweat peppering his forehead. His lips were clamped together, white at their edges, and he was breathing heavily through his nose.

‘Jack,' she said.

He opened his eyes and gave a low cry but without seeming to see Pearl. His gaze hovered over her shoulder at the window, a tremor coming into his hands as he tried to pull the blanket over his face. Pearl turned to look at what he was staring at but saw nothing except the partly drawn curtains and the suggestion of light between them.

Jack jumped suddenly. ‘No, no!' he shouted. ‘You can't… I won't let…'

Pearl laid her hand on Jack's arm to calm him but he flinched at her touch as if he had been burnt.

‘Get back,' he cried. ‘No, get away.… No, no…'

Nicholas could have come to the house again, looking for her and finding only Jack. Would Nicholas be angry with her, for marrying Jack? Pearl paced the room but couldn't feel the weight of Nicholas's presence that had come before. There were no creaking floorboards, no furring shadows to give his spirit shape. Everything felt ordinary. It was only a room just before dawn, holding two people and some furniture.

Jack whimpered, closed his eyes, and grew still beneath the blanket. Nicholas wasn't there. Jack was only dreaming and there was nothing Pearl could do to soothe him. She couldn't soothe herself.

She felt she had only just closed her eyes when Jack banged the front door shut behind him. Her head ached and it took some time for her eyes to focus. A swim would help but there was no way to risk it with the widows keeping watch, so, as usual, she would have to recreate the sensation as best she could.

The light in the bedroom was poor, giving the impression of an overcast sky. Perhaps autumn's rain had finally arrived to finish off this lingering summer. The damp patch on the ceiling appeared to have spread but it had been so dry; the house's water stains could only be from the sea working its wet breath inside the walls, slipping between the beams and their nails. At this rate the ceiling would be more rot than plaster and when it fell, she and Jack would disappear under its crumbly blanket. When the storm came as the white hare predicted, and with it all the rain that had been missing from Morlanow recently, the weak little house would fold in on itself like cardboard.

She needed to get out of bed and near some proper water. These mouldering traces weren't enough. Pearl opened the curtains. There was dirt on the floor at the end of the bed. It was on her side and shaped like the marks of a heel and toes. Bending down, she saw that as well as mud sand lay on the floor, and something else, something small and shiny that she couldn't quite see. She licked her finger and put it to the dot of silver, then brought her finger close to her face.

Her breath died in her throat and she fell against the bed. The room was fading, its edges disappearing. The white light was galloping in towards her. She was going to drop into it and never get out, but she had to know for sure. She made herself concentrate, pulling the room back towards her again, because she had to think clearly about what this scrap of silver was. She blinked and stared hard at it. It was as bright as if it had just fallen from the flesh: a torn pilchard scale.

Pearl had seen millions in her lifetime but none were as precious as this. She knew what should be done with it for the time being, until the shoal returned. Pearl licked her finger again, swallowing the scale to keep it safe.

She was in no doubt now that Nicholas must have been in the house again. There was the physical mark of his boot – she couldn't be imagining such a thing, it was right there in front of her. And he had left her the token of the scale so that she would keep faith with him.

Pearl got up from the floor and went downstairs to get a cloth. Jack wouldn't have seen the mark on the floor as he dressed and it wouldn't do for him to find it when he got home that evening. He was looking for a way to catch her out. Pearl wiped away the trace of Nicholas, thinking of the scale held inside her, and felt a gleam of light coursing through her blood.

Singing to herself and every stick of furniture, she filled a pail from the outside tap, and staggered back with it. When had such an everyday task become as difficult as when she was a child? Inside, she leaned against the door, waiting for her chest to ease, swallowing the coughs that rose in her throat. Then she hunted for the largest bowl she owned and eventually found it underneath the table, which wasn't its usual place at all.

She filled the bowl and carried it into the room next to the kitchen which got more light at this time of day. She took off her boots then sat down and plunged her bare feet into the bowl of water. The delicious chill wove up her legs, giving her body a hint of paddling in the shallows. Pearl wiggled her toes, sending fresh waves of pleasure over her feet to convince her body she was in the sea. It wasn't as good as getting into the tin bath, where she would be completely covered with her eyes open underneath, but this would have to do.

Pearl rolled the balls of her feet backwards and forwards so that the cold snapped at her ankles. Water slopped onto the floorboards but she didn't care. She closed her eyes and saw the bowl's contents flipping and growing, waves rising and pouring into the room, as if there was some invisible source pumping the salt water into the house from the shimmering hole of the bowl, now a foot or so beneath the surface. As the water level began to rise, the tension returned to her temples and Pearl was aware of a change in the good room's settled air. It was the same she had felt the night that Nicholas had first come back to her: a force pushing on the walls.

She was good at detecting the presence of others. It was some part of Aunt Lilly's pellar gift making itself known in Pearl, perhaps. She had been the best at finding Jack when he crouched amongst the hogsheads during hide and seek, though she didn't give him away every time. She had the same feeling now, that she wasn't alone, but she wasn't frightened. Nicholas had been a gentle soul and he had loved her once, she was sure.

The sea had come into the house through the bowl of water and now its tide grew darker, swallowing the daylight. The water ran across the floor and lapped at the bed, then dipped and pushed on again, coming up to the window ledge. Her boots bobbed past, looking like leather wrecks about to founder. On and on the water flowed, filling the whole room with darkness so that Pearl was lifted off her chair. She floated towards the ceiling, and as it came close to her face, she rolled over and dived down to the shadows of the seabed where the floorboards had been.

A horn was sounding its call, plaintive and low. A ship was coming. Nicholas was coming to get her. She lifted her arms to hail it and her elbow brushed something hard. It was the arm of the chair. She was in the room by the kitchen, her feet resting on the sodden floor and the bowl overturned nearby. How long had she been gone?

The horn sounded again and was joined by another. Pearl padded to the window and saw a stationary line of motor cars packed nose to tail, evidently trying to descend the road into Morlanow.

She drew the curtain to hide the sight of the cars, though their horns and ticking engines followed her into the kitchen. She lit the stove and put the kettle on. Her fingers were jittery and she wanted to be calmer before Jack arrived back. A cup of tea would help. She sat down and waited for the kettle's whistle.

The cars had started with the train, strange as it seemed now. It was the train that opened the village up to the world. Wedged deep into the cliff as Morlanow was, the engineers had to blast a tunnel through the rock to get the engine there and then another to get it out again. There were trains for people and trains for fish, hogsheads of pilchards and crates of mackerel riding first class to London. Sometimes there were trains for paintings and sometimes the fish were packed in alongside them, if a big enough catch came in, and there were rows at the station when word came back from London that fish oil had seeped into the canvases.