Chapter 19 #2
Sunday dawns dry and warm, and after the news broadcast went out last night, it’s much busier than yesterday, and the antiques themselves are dwindling fast. Ren, Ava, and I have brought some more stuff up from the shop, and all my fellow shopkeepers have volunteered to come back for the second day of the antiques fair too.
It’s mid-afternoon and Lissa’s gone for a tea break, and Ava is in her element with me at the diary stall, while Ren has gone off with fellow history geek Witt to talk about, I don’t know, historical points of architectural interest in the castle or something like that, when a woman approaches, clutching a wooden chest that’s decorated with seashells and has an anchor-shaped padlock on the front. It gives me an immediate flashback to the one we found the diary in, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
‘I think you have something that belongs to my family.’ She puts the chest down on an empty spot on our table and points to the diary in the locked display box.
Ava’s attention was on a goth-type teenage boy trailing behind a parent down in the courtyard, but her head suddenly whips around and I see her clock the similar chest and the woman’s finger, pointing towards our diary.
‘We’ve spent months searching for it. Imagine my surprise when I saw you on the news last night and there it was!’
I place my palm on the box. ‘You’re saying this is yours?’
‘It was sold off in the house clearance by mistake, wasn’t it? That’s how you came by it?’
I nod, trying to ignore the sinking feeling coming over me. Did we say that to the news reporter last night? I don’t think we did. I don’t think she’d know that if she didn’t have a legitimate claim to the book.
‘It’s a family heirloom,’ she continues. ‘My mum had possession of it, and when she passed away last year, although we looked for it in her house, we couldn’t find it anywhere. In the haze of grief, my sister and I assumed our aunt must’ve had it, and our aunt assumed one of us had it, and it was only weeks after the house clearance sale when we all got together that we realised none of us had it, and it must’ve been in Mum’s belongings all along. We’ve been desperately trying to trace the buyers who purchased bundles from the house, but the auction company have been most unforthcoming in sharing details. My sister and I have been trawling antiques shops in the area, my aunt has been mounting an online search, and there you were on the local news, waiting for us to find you.’
‘We don’t know if that’s true!’ Ava snaps. ‘We talked to a ton of journalists yesterday, we definitely told some of them that it came from a house clearance, you could’ve just seen their articles and now you’re trying to claim it because you know it’s valuable.’
I wince at the panicked-angry tone in her voice. She loves this diary, and like I am, she’s realising that it isn’t ours, and this woman is most probably the rightful owner.
‘What’s your name?’ I ask, trying to defuse the situation and find out more, because Ava’s got a point, she could just be a chancer, trying to get her hands on something of value, but the chest she’s carrying is almost identical to the one we found the diary in, and there’s no way someone trying to pull a fast one would know about that.
‘I’m Pamela. Mayme was my great-great-great-great-aunt.’
‘Mayme? That was her name?’ Ava steps closer, her interest obviously piqued.
It adds a whole new layer to this. We’ve never known her name. How often do you write your own name in a diary? You write about the people around you, the things that happen to you, but never include your own name.
Mayme. I’m almost afraid to ask my next question. ‘Was she really a…?’
‘Mermaid?’ Pamela laughs. ‘Oh, heavens no, of course not. She was born with deformed vocal cords so she was never able to talk. Mayme means “drop of the sea” and family legend goes that she always loved the ocean and when she read the Hans Christian Andersen story, she felt it was meant for her. She connected with the mermaid who couldn’t make herself heard. We think it gave her comfort to believe she was really a misplaced creature from another world rather than a human so different from all others, and so incapable of this most basic thing that everyone else can do without a second thought. Everyone around her, seemingly everyone in the world can speak, but she couldn’t, and in those days, doctors were at a loss. Apparently no one knew what to make of her – her parents babied her, looked after her, protected her from the world, and when they passed, she was left in the care of her sister, who had no time for her. Her sister had always thought she was playing up for attention, and she trotted her around to various witchdoctors for potions and herbal remedies and eventually a real doctor realised there was something physically wrong, but medical operations in those days didn’t have the advantages of modern technology and there was no treatment.’
‘That’s what she meant about doctors poking and prodding her and humans coming to look at her.’ Ava is listening intently; the prospect of finding out the truth has overtaken all her other doubts.
This suddenly makes so much sense. Of course she wasn’t a mermaid. Of course she was just a normal person who must have felt anything but normal. She found sanctuary in this ocean-themed idea that she was somehow different from everyone else. The idea that there was something – by choice – that set her apart. It must have made the rejection and the feeling that no one understood her easier to cope with.
‘And the island? The boat sinking? The sailor? We’ve been to Arfordir-M?r-Forwyn so we know that actually happened…’
‘She was a lighthouse keeper.’
I gasp and grab Ava’s hand. ‘We saw it! On the boat trip, we saw the ruins of a lighthouse in the distance, didn’t we?’
Ava nods excitedly, and I carry on, because now we know, it all seems so obvious. ‘Of course she was a lighthouse keeper. That’s why she felt responsible for his boat running aground – not because she was a mermaid luring him to a watery doom, but because she’d…?’
‘Got caught up in the book she was reading and forgotten to light the oil lamps until it was too late.’
‘I always knew she was my kind of person,’ Ava says. ‘How could we ever have really thought she was a mermaid?’
‘It’s an easy mistake to make,’ Pamela says kindly, and I can’t help thinking about how strange this must be for her – to see her family heirloom displayed for all to see, photocopied pages from it enlarged and flapping around in the summer breeze. It’s quite possible that no one outside of their family has ever read it before, and here we are, broadcasting it on the local news and talking to every reporter under the sun, about the possibility of it really being written by a mermaid.
Lissa returns from her break at that moment and comes over curiously, and I explain what’s going on.
‘What about Jeremiah?’ Ava’s hand squeezes mine, sounding like she’s not sure if she wants to know the answer or not. ‘Please tell us he survived!’
‘He survived.’ Pamela looks bemused by how invested we are in this. ‘Months later, he came to find her in England, they were married and had four children.’
‘Oh my God, I can’t wait to tell Dad!’ Ava throws her arms around me. ‘I knew it couldn’t end like that! So did you! It’s proof that love can overcome everything! Did they stay together forever?’
‘They were happy together until she died in the 1940s, and him not much longer after. It was said that he died of a broken heart.’
Ava pulls away and puts a hand on her chest and lets out a wistful sigh. ‘That’s the most romantic thing ever!’
Pamela is watching like she can’t quite believe she’s having this conversation about something so personal with a couple of strangers. ‘I love how much this mattered to you. We often thought about sharing the story outside of the family, but we didn’t know how to or if our relatives from times gone by would want us to. Can you imagine what a Victorian lady would make of things like the internet and the idea of so many people from all around the world reading her intimate thoughts?’
‘We did think of that.’ Ava sounds immediately defensive again. ‘But we thought she was an actual mermaid and it was important to share that.’
‘Oh, I know. I didn’t mean you’d done anything wrong. I think what you’ve done is lovely. All of this information you’ve found out. You even went all the way to Arfordir-M?r-Forwyn? You saw her lighthouse? Even we have never done that.’
‘I wish we’d known about the lighthouse. We’d have found someone with a boat to take us closer to it. It was miles offshore, past the other islands around the coast. I can’t believe none of us put two and two together and realised what she was doing out there. Even when we saw the lighthouse remains, it didn’t occur to me…’
‘It’s nice that people still believe in magic in this day and age,’ Pamela says. ‘I never knew her obviously, but I think Mayme would like knowing that her musings could have such an impact, even so many years later.’
It makes me look around for Ren. He should be here too, hearing this, counting out the ways he can say ‘I told you so’ because he was annoyingly right on the mermaid front.
‘Our mum used to read me and my sister those diary excerpts as bedtime stories. She had grown up with her mum doing the same, and her grandmother telling her tall tales of the mum before her, passing the story down for generations. My sister and I used to talk about it all the time. It bonded us as children. Everyone who overheard thought it was something we’d made up. I’m honoured that you’ve all fallen in love with it like we did…’ Her kindly smile turns awkward as she looks between me, Lissa, Ava, and the diary. ‘And I’d really like it back…’
Ava recoils instantly. ‘You can’t have it back! It’s not yours! You gave it away!’
‘Not intentionally, pet. We were all struggling after our mum died. Sorting her house out was one of the hardest things we’d ever had to face. We knew the book would be somewhere safe, but it had been passed between her and our aunt over the years, depending on the ages of the children they had to read bedtime stories to, so we just thought…’ Her fingers rub over the wooden crate she brought with her. ‘We assumed it was in this box with everything else, and we didn’t find out that it wasn’t until it was too late.’
‘Oh, Dad! Thank God you’re here!’ Ava spots Ren coming back up the steps before I do and races over to grab his arm and drag him over. ‘This lady is trying to take the diary! Tell her she can’t have it! It’s ours, right? You paid for it!’
‘I didn’t…’ Ren looks as surprised as he might if he’d meandered back over and been walloped round the face with a wet mackerel. His eyes flit between us all with a bewildered look. ‘Can someone explain what’s going on?’
Ava rushes through a garbled explanation, and I try to fill in the gaps in her haste.
Ren turns to Pamela. ‘Well, she does have a point. Anyone could come here and make up a story from what they’ve seen on the news last night, although…’ He glances at the wooden crate and then at me, and he can clearly tell from my face that I’m pretty certain she’s for real. ‘We can’t even ask you to tell us what’s in the diary because it’s printed behind us in enlarged font. Is there any way you can prove it?’
‘Well, I do have some of her other diaries.’ She opens the wooden box and we all step closer to peer in, and sure enough, there are other books in there, notebooks that are clearly old and look very similar to this one.
It’s a real Cinderella moment, like at the end of the animated film when the glass slipper smashes and Cinderella tells the duke not to worry because she has the other one. With everything she’s said, I had very little doubt about her claim anyway, but no one can argue with proof like that.
‘Can I have a look?’ Ren asks politely.
Pamela takes out a thicker book and hands it to him. ‘This is her diary from 1900. The first entry in particular might interest you.’
Ren brushes his hands on his trousers before he takes it from her and opens it carefully, laying it on the plastic display box so all three of us can see it with Lissa peering over my shoulder.
27 June 1900
I never thought I’d see him again. I have spent so many nights crying over what was lost. I have been certain that he died on the night he left the island.
It is Wednesday, another dreary day so like each one before it, and I am asleep when my sister shouts from the stairway. I am always asleep these days – what reason could there be to get up and face life? I know they have found his ship. I know they believe him to have perished – as do I.
My sister tells me that I have a visitor and I must get up to greet him immediately. I do not know why anyone would want to visit me, but I pull a robe around myself and descend the stairs.
It is him.
He is standing in the doorway. He was wearing a cap but has taken it off to come in, although my sister has not permitted him entry further than the front hallway. He looks up as I come down, and the smile that blazes across his face could illuminate the lamps of a thousand lighthouses, and suddenly, the whole world feels brighter.
He is alive. He is here.
Enough tears to refill the ocean are pouring down my face and I momentarily forget that no noise will be heard and let out a scream as I run the rest of the way.
He catches me at the bottom and lifts me from the last stair. He picks me up and spins me around and I feel so happy that I could explode all over my sister’s front hallway, although I must not, because she would consider me even more of an inconvenience than she does currently.
He waits outside while I get dressed and we walk in the local park. He remembered enough information from our time together to come to my village and make enquiries until he came upon my sister’s home. His leg is better – he still limps, but not as badly as almost a year ago. He has had to falsify his last name so as not to serve a prison sentence. He has what he calls ‘friends in the wrong places’ and they have provided him with false paperwork for his journey by ferry across the sea. He must never return to Ireland, but it does not matter. He says he doesn’t want to return there because I am not there. I feel like I do explode right there in the park and a million butterflies come bursting out of me.
At nightfall, as the streetlamps are lit and the stars glitter above us, he sinks to one knee and asks me to be his wife.
I say yes. No sound comes out, but it is the most important word I’ve ever spoken in my life.