CHAPTER THREE A Clear Hour #2
I lay with my hands on my stomach and went through myself.
Nothing hurt. Nothing was wrong. The pull under my ribs was there, and quiet. It hasn’t completely left me since the shore, and I’ve stopped mentioning it, the way you stop mentioning a draught in a room you mean to go on living in. No knock was coming. Nothing had been left on my step overnight.
And a man I’d kissed in my own kitchen, with nothing on earth making either of us do it, was asleep in the front room right underneath me. I could hear him breathing through the floorboards.
I stayed there forty minutes, because getting up would start the day, and once it started it would begin getting used up.
? ? ?
He’d already lit the stove when I came down, and he’d made a mess of it.
“That’s too much kindling.”
“Good morning to you as well.”
“You’ve built a chimney. It’ll roar for four minutes and die and you’ll be starting over.” I crouched and pulled half of it out and rearranged the rest, and the flame caught low and steady, blue at the root. “There.”
“I resent how fast that worked.”
“Liora taught me. She could get a fire out of wet rope and spite.”
He was leaning on the dresser with his arms folded.
The early light came in sideways through the kitchen window, that thin white light before the sun’s properly up over the harbour, and it wasn’t doing him any favours.
He looked like a man who’d slept thirty nights on a settle too short for him.
The blanket seam had pressed a crease down one cheek.
His hair, which is dark and thick and won’t be told anything, had gone up on one side like a wing.
I looked at him and something went through me so enormous and so undignified that I turned back to the stove and took a sudden interest in the flue.
? ? ?
We went down into town at nine, because we had no bread and no excuse not to.
On a fine autumn morning Duskmere smells of four things, always in the same order, coming down the hill.
Woodsmoke first, from the row on Cooper’s Lane where they’re all up before six.
Then the drains, briefly, at the turn by the pump, which the town’s been meaning to see to since before I was born.
Then tar and rope from the chandler’s open door, warm and black and strangely sweet.
And then past the last house, all at once, the harbour: salt and weed and fish blood and wet stone, so much of it that you stop smelling it and just feel it pressing on your face.
The tide was a long way out. The boats sat down in the mud at their undignified angles, keels showing, rudders cocked, mooring lines slack and dripping, and the mud had gone that slick pewter it goes in sun, pocked all over with worm casts and the feet of two hundred gulls.
The gulls were fighting about something on the slipway.
They are always fighting about something on the slipway.
Three men were painting the Margaret Rees where they’d hauled her out. The pitch smell came over the water to us, and one of them was singing something filthy and flat, and the other two were letting him get on with it.
Elias put his hand to the small of my back to steer me round a coil of net.
He does that. He’s been doing it since summer.
Only this time he didn’t take it away again, and we walked the last forty feet to the bread stall like that, in front of the whole harbour and the slipway and all three painters, and I could feel the flat warm weight of his palm through my coat and the whole left side of my face went hot.
? ? ?
What happened at the bread stall took about eleven seconds.
Old Ness runs it. She’s eighty if she’s a day, with hands like knotted rope, and she sells out by ten and goes home, and nothing on earth will make her bake more. She looked up and saw me and did what the town had been doing since the shore: the face closing, the extra air left round me.
Then her eyes went to Elias’s hand, and where it was, and back up to me.
And she grinned. No teeth on one side. A huge, appalling, delighted grin. “About time,” she said, and slapped a loaf down so hard the flour went up off it in a cloud and hung there in the low sun like incense.
I stood there with my mouth open.
“That’ll be the same as always,” Ness said, “and you can tell that lot at the Gull I said it first.”
? ? ?
I laughed most of the way up the hill. It kept starting up again.
“She’s known me since I was fifteen. She used to give me the burnt ends for nothing and tell me I was too thin. Three weeks ago she wouldn’t look at me.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m a woman with a man, which she understands, and apparently that beats whatever else I am.” I wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. “Elias, she was pleased. Pleased with me. She hasn’t been pleased with me like that since.”
I stopped walking.
We’d come up round the bend where the whole bay opens out.
The two arms of the headland, the grey water lying flat and glittering all the way out to a horizon with three sails on it, and the light coming down hard and clean the way it does in autumn, pulling the far cliffs in closer than they really are.
The wind up there had teeth in it. It had got into my hair and pulled half of it out of its pins.
“Since what?”
“Since Samuel.”
Gulls went over.
“I was fifteen, and for about a year after, the whole town handled me so carefully I could have screamed. Then one day Ness gave me a proper bawling out for dawdling in the queue, and I went home and cried for an hour, I was that relieved.” I moved the loaf to my other arm.
“She’s the barometer. She always has been. ”
Elias was looking out at the water with his collar up and his hands in his pockets.
“Then the town’s not frightened of you. It’s frightened for you. It hasn’t got the words for it, so it comes out sideways.”
I thought about the nine things on my hearthstone.
“Or it’s both.”
“Or it’s both,” he said mildly, and took the bread off me because I was strangling it.
? ? ?
The day went on being good, and I found that harder and harder to stand.
We ate on the step again. I mended a shirt of his, badly, while he read a book he’d got hold of from somewhere and stopped every ten minutes to read me out a sentence that offended him.
A cat that isn’t mine sat on the wall and looked at us with the flat contempt of something that doesn’t pay rent.
The sun went round, and the chimney’s shadow crept over the yard and got to the gate at about four, and the gate hung there in it, square and true, not doing anything.
And I sat with a needle in my hand and his shirt in my lap and him reading next to me, and felt the afternoon start to tip over towards evening, and began, and I’m not proud of this, to grieve for it.
While it was still happening, I mean. Right in the middle of it.
The best afternoon I’d had in nineteen years, and I sat in it mourning, because some animal part of me had already worked out this could be taken off me and was busy getting its flinch in early.
“You’ve stopped sewing,” Elias said, without looking up.
“I’m thinking.”
“You’ve stopped sewing in a particular way.”
“I can’t hold it.”
He put the book down on the step, face up and open, and weighted the page with a pebble.
“Hold what?”
“This.” I waved the needle about, and it took in the yard and the gate and the wall and the cat and the crumbs and him.
“I keep reaching for it and it runs out through my fingers. I’ve been braced my whole life, and now there’s nothing to brace for, and my hands don’t know what else to do.
” I heard myself and hated it. “It’s ingratitude. I know it’s ingratitude, you needn’t.”
“It’s not ingratitude.”
“Then what is it?”
He was quiet long enough for a gull to cross the whole yard.
“It’s a body that’s been on watch nineteen years.
You don’t stand a man down from a watch by telling him the war’s over.
He stays at his post. Months, sometimes.
” He picked a curl of gate shaving up off the step and turned it over in his fingers.
“My father was like that till the day he died. Sat with his back to the wall in his own kitchen for forty years.”
“That’s not very encouraging.”
“No.” He flicked the shaving off into the yard. “But nobody ever sat down next to him and told him he could stop.”
I looked at the side of his face. The blanket crease had finally gone. The wind had done something ridiculous to his hair.
“Are you telling me I can stop?”
“God, no,” Elias said. “There’s something the size of a weather front in that sea leaving you presents. I’d keep the watch.” He leaned back on his hands. “I’m offering to take a turn at it. That’s all I’ve got. It’s not much.”
It wasn’t nothing. I didn’t tell him that. I didn’t trust my voice to get through it.
The cat went. The light thinned to amber, and then to no colour at all.
I finished the shirt. It was a dreadful job, one sleeve puckered where it had no business puckering and the thread a shade out, and I handed it over, and he pulled it on over what he already had on and didn’t take it off for the rest of the evening.
Down in the cove, the whole time, the sea kept turning the shingle over.