The Visitor (6 page)

‘This is bigger; more of a mackerel driver like the east coast men sail,' Nicholas says. Jack is silent. ‘How about
Storm Beater
?' Nicholas asks, his eyes wide with the certainty of his idea. ‘She's one of the fastest east coast boats.'

Nicholas always decides, because he's the oldest. Jack's face reddens again and his hands curl into fists. For a moment he stands rigid apart from a shake in his arms, then he picks up a stone and hurls it into the water. The splash upsets the boat and it tips over and sinks, the handkerchief closing up like a jellyfish as it goes.

Two

The windowpane was cold against her cheek. One side of her body was full of stiffness and it took a moment for her eyes to focus. The white sail seemed to have burned them. Her boots were by the front door, splayed and pale with cliff path dust. Had she just come in? Yet here she was in the bedroom looking down at the sea and the light gone from the day. She moved to gather the boots and felt the roughness of sand between her toes. She smelled seawater in her hair.

Footsteps on the other side of the front door made her jump and she was afraid but didn't know why. The sound stopped and there were voices: Jack and Mrs Tiddy. Pearl picked up her boots and stood them together by the wall, then hurried to the kitchen. That was where she was meant to be now. It was dark. That meant supper. An ache in her head collected at her temple. She leant against the table to catch her breath.

Someone was coming in. It was Nicholas. She would lock the door, keep him out. Her breath was harder to catch. She heard herself wheezing. The door opened. But instead of the young man with narrow lips and dark eyes, tall and lean in a smart jacket, it was Jack.

‘It's a fair walk from the front in this heat,' he puffed, putting a newspaper parcel on the table. Nicholas was gone. The smell of fish and sweat filled the room. Jack had been talking to Mrs Tiddy. The woman wanted something, she always did. Jack rubbed his sunburnt forehead with his arm; she noticed the freckles and white hair on his skin, the small twists of his ears. When had he become so old? His trousers had another hole at the knee: something else to mend.

She went over to undo his boots but when she bent to kneel, the ache in her head broke in to a flare of pain and she fell against the table. Jack caught her by the elbow and then lowered her into his own chair.

‘What have you been up to now then, eh?' he said.

‘Nothing. I… nothing.'

Jack tutted and fussed. He went to put the kettle on but burnt himself trying to light the stove.

‘Leave it,' she said. ‘I'll be all right.'

He looked at her hard from across the room. ‘You've not been swimming, have you? You know how it makes you.'

Pearl shook her head but even as she did so she wasn't sure. She was tired, as if she'd done something vigorous. She tried to push her wet hair behind her ears, to hide it from him, but it was so tangled. Jack began to pace, still in his boots. Pearl breathed slowly to ease her chest. Jack stopped as her soft rasps came.

He waited until her breathing calmed. ‘You need to be careful, Pearl. I'd not be much use if you were laid up in Pentreath, would I? Eight miles away, and me here on my own.'

She wanted to tell him he wouldn't be on his own, that he would have George, but the words wouldn't come. Jack wouldn't want to hear them, and Mrs Tiddy probably wouldn't leave him alone either.

‘You'll be all right, won't you?' She nodded, and he went on, ‘No need to worry the doctor then.'

She was able to undo his boots but didn't lean too closely into his legs in case he smelt the seawater. Certainty came to her then.

‘I went down the hill, to see the old house.' Yes, that was it. She was tired from the walk back, as Jack had been. But her wet hair?

‘Why ever did you do that?' he said. He rolled the tiredness of the day from his still broad shoulders. ‘It'd only upset you.' He got up to wash his hands, a sign that it was time for supper. She stayed kneeling on the floor, not able to find the energy to stand as she thought about the man in her house. ‘What's this?' Jack went over to the front door. There was the scrap of white again. The handkerchief sail had slipped inside the house. Jack was picking it up.

It was Pascoe's letter.

When she had washed the supper things they sat together in the room next to the kitchen. There was no mantle for the pictures or the clock, which was now partly hidden in a recess by the window. The wallpaper was peeling in this room too, though not as badly as in the damp bedroom, and the floor wouldn't come clean no matter how much Pearl scrubbed.

Jack read the newspaper, humphing to himself every so often, but never sharing his thoughts. There didn't seem to be anything to say. The Carew Street house was lost. She was mending, Jack was reading. It was just as before. Except it didn't feel like that. Something had shifted when they moved up the hill. Something had come loose.

The trousers Jack had been wearing when he came home lay across her lap, showing a tear at the knee. She threaded the needle and pulled the pieces of cloth together, making a lip to stitch and it was done, mended. The trousers would do another day, though the weave was thinning round the tear. She held them up to the light. Soon they would need a patch, but Jack was used to such making do.

He had never had fine clothes. He had barely had clean ones until she married him. Not like Nicholas. She had tried to forget about him for so long but here he was, in the midst of her thoughts and it was wonderful to think of him, but at the same time awful.

He was hard to ignore, liking to cut a dash. Working on shore helped him stay tidy, once the Master took him on. When the great shoals of pilchards came in there was money for everyone, and often a bit of something extra for Nicholas, for the man who tallied the fish and counted out the shares. The clever man who had been a clever boy, reckoning the worth of a shoal while it was still being brought ashore. She saw him standing, face to the sea, watching. The desire to touch him, to cup his cheek and turn his face to hers, burned through her and she was shocked at its force after all this time. But why should the feeling disappear? She had stayed here, stayed the same. The years since she had last been able to touch him made no difference. Her body was old now, but it wasn't beyond this need. It was hers still. She clung to it fiercely.

The hidden clock chimed the hour. Jack burred a gentle snore. The trousers had slipped to the floor and as she bent to pick them up the clock's low ting swelled to a peal. She kept her head lowered. Nicholas's face came clearer. He was turning round, looking away from the sea. There was his long, sloping nose, his thin lips pressed together against the cold. The lamp burned red then went out. The clock chimed on and on.

Three

The bell is ringing from the cliff top and everyone is running. Even people that Pearl thought were too old to run, like Mr Isaac senior, the cooper. He's galloping towards the seafront, using his stick to propel him over the cobbles, his black hat a cormorant bobbing in a sea of clothes.

‘Hevva!' shouts Mr Isaac senior. The fishermen rushing to get their seine boats to the water's edge shout it back at him.
Hevva
: they are here. A magic, longed-for word that lets the whole village know pilchards are in sight, and to Pearl it's veined with money.

The first shoal of this season is on its way into Morlanow's waters and the fish are early. There hasn't even been launch day yet, Pearl's favourite day of the year; even better than Christmas. But sometimes the fish are like that, not doing what they're supposed to. Time gets away from Pearl then, without the patterns she's learnt. It's easy to forget.

She's following a group of boys to the seafront to watch the boats being hastily launched. Nicholas and Jack are there, with Timothy Wills and the two Pengelley boys, James and Stephen, all from school. They're shouting and knocking into one another. She wants to be in the crowd of their excitement but when she comes closer Timothy spins round and shoves her over. ‘Go away,' he says. ‘You're bad luck.' He has crooked teeth and a wide nose. In the schoolroom he flicks ink at the ceiling when the teacher isn't looking. Pearl would like to push him in the harbour.

She looks to Nicholas but he's looking out to sea, watching the boats, and hasn't noticed her. Jack is pretending to do the same, but she can see the red flush he gets when he's nervous creeping up his neck. He won't talk to her while Timothy's here. She picks herself up and sees dirt slashed across her dress.

She moves away from the boys, back down the harbour wall onto the seafront. As she passes the palace doorway she sees the Master wringing his big square hands. ‘An early shoal, ill luck,' he mutters to himself. ‘Ill luck to come so early.'

He's a fancy man, a duck-eater, her father says. Born in a big house on the hill near the Tregurtha Hotel. But he works with the fishermen as well as being fancy. Today the Master's wearing a scuffed black hat and a dark blue greatcoat which is buttoned against the rain that always comes with the fish. Pilchards will only come when it rains so Pearl prays for that every night before she goes to sleep.

The Master spies a knot of his women coming out onto the seafront and sets off towards them, waving his hat. Her mother is there, and Polly, and her father's sister Lilly. They see the Master and look as if they might run away, like in a game of chase at school, but it's too late.

‘Inside!' he shouts, flapping at them. ‘Get inside, my dears, and close your eyes. Here, take my hand, Annie,' he says to Nicholas's mother, catching her wrist and holding on tight. ‘I'll guide you.' The other women hold hands and are led to the palace by the Master, their eyes tight shut, making a snake of aprons. ‘No more looking,' the Master says. ‘You might've cursed us further if you looked at that catch. Fish'll be straight back out to sea.'

Pearl tries to duck behind a hogshead but is too late. A hand grabs her skirts and she's hauled along by the Master. ‘You too,' he says.

In they trip beneath the overhanging roof that rings the palace and then across the uncovered centre of the courtyard. There's a cellar at the far end, beyond the rinsing troughs. The Master drives the women down the uneven, slippery steps and locks the trapdoor.

Darkness; except for a few shafts of light that fall through the holes in the trapdoor. The cellar reeks of fish and each mouthful of air tastes like a Saturday catch eaten on a Monday. The walls and floor are wet and the darkness weighs down. It's airless and awful and Pearl needs to get out. Struggling to find the steps leading up to the trapdoor, her feet slip and she falls into cold, dirty water, and begins to cry. Someone takes her hand – she knows by the long plaits that tickle her face that it's Polly, and as her sister whispers to her, the dark loses its deeper shades and the bad air seems to sink away.

‘How many fish will Father catch?' asks Polly.

‘I don't know.' Pearl sniffs.

‘He's going to get a fair few, I should think. Enough to buy you a present.'

‘Really?' Pearl says.

‘You could have a dress. What colour would you like?'

‘I'd like a bathing suit, with red and white stripes. I saw Miss Charles wear one when she went in the sea and Mr Michaels looked at her and he said—'

A cough disrupts them. Pearl recognises it as her mother's and knows that lusting after bathing suits is wicked, and Miss Charles the art teacher is wicked too, somehow. Polly must realise it as well because she doesn't say anything else, only holds Pearl's hand.

As her eyes adjust to the darkness, Pearl picks out shapes squatting on the puddled floor or leaning against the uneven walls. One apart is Alice Trelawn, her face turned away from the faint light coming through the trapdoor's chinks. No one will work near her in the palace either. Nicholas's mother, Annie, begins a prayer, which the rest of the women join in with, Alice's voice the loudest.

After a while they run out of steam and silence returns. Pearl squats between her mother and Polly and the afternoon creaks on. Her knees grow stiff and her stomach grumbles its hunger.

‘Why can't we go out and watch the fish coming in?' she asks. ‘I want to see Father shoot the net.'

Her mother eases her fingers through the tangles of Pearl's hair. ‘You know we must do as the Master says, however foolish it seems.' The shapes against the walls titter.

Pearl jerks her head away. ‘It's not fair. The boys don't have to come down here.'

Somehow in the dark she can hear her mother's smile. ‘They say ill luck can be skirted,' she says. ‘If shutting us in here gets the fish in then that's what must be done.'

What must be done. The Master is in charge of the harbour, agent for the three Mr Tillotsons who own the mines near Pentreath. They own many seine boats and nets too, and this palace, the biggest in Morlanow. Pearl's never seen the Mr Tillotson brothers. They are a little like God the Father, believed in but not there to look at.

She can't tell how long she's been in the cellar when there is suddenly light and fresh air and the enormous grin of the Master beaming down.