The Silver Dark Sea. Susan Fletcher
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Название: The Silver Dark Sea
Автор: Susan Fletcher
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Сказки
isbn: 9780007465095
isbn:
Beside him, his wife reads. He can hear the pages as she turns them, how their bottom edges catch the bedspread to make a dragging sound. He asks what book is it?
He asks, but Jim knows. The book has a leather smell. He’d heard its spine crack as she’d opened it.
Abigail says Folklore and Myth. You know the one.
Yes he does. And as soon as Jim had heard that a man – bearded, very handsome – had been washed up at the cove called Sye, he’d known that this was the book that his wife would turn to. She’d take it from its shelf, and find its fourteenth page. She’d smooth that page with her palm.
Dearest, she says – do you know what this reminds me of?
Abigail of the stories. Abigail who is eighty-three years old and yet whose love of this one book is absolute, childlike.
The Fishman. Your Fishman. The one you saw off Sye.
And there it is – the word he knew was coming. Like so many other words, it is uttered and the breeze catches it and it is carried out of the Old Fish Store over the island. It blows against the rusting cars at High Haven; it scuds on the beaches with the night-time spume. It has been down on the sea bed, perhaps; for years, it has been half-forgotten, tapped at by passing claws. But Abigail has hauled up Fishman now. The word surfaces – beautiful, glass-bright.
* * *
This word will make its way to all of us, in time. It will knock against our doors and we will all be saying it. Even I will talk of the Fishman – but not yet.
Night. People turn to sleep. They close the back door, or rub cream on their feet. They finish their chapters or lie in deep baths with tea lights next to the taps and think about the day’s events. In the cottage by the school a couple are making love. The brown dog at the foot of their bed yawns with a whine, flaps his ears, and they break away from their kissing and smile at the sound in the dark.
One by one, eyes close.
But also, two eyes open. In a room that smells of lavender, two black eyes open, blink twice. Three times.
He lies very still, listening.
After a while, he lifts the blankets, looks down at his long, white legs.
As for Maggie, she climbs out of the bath. She wraps a towel about her. Four years have passed, or nearly four. Who told her the grief would lessen? Grief does not lessen; it changes, and perhaps she has changed so that she can endure it better. But the grief does not grow less.
She misses him beyond words. She will never have the words for how much she misses him.
The Seals with Human Hearts
Of all the sea creatures – whales, turtles, lobsters with their intricate, grooved tails that can slide into themselves like a fan, the jellyfish, the squid, the octopus that I reckon knows far more than I can ever know – it is the seal I love the most. I always have. And it’s hard to be sure if I love the seals for the stories I have heard of them or for their expressions – quizzical, trusting. Both maybe. Both is most likely.
The first seal I ever saw was near Tap Hole. It was winter or late autumn, at least, for I wore woollen gloves with a matching hat. I had the hat pulled down very low. It covered my ears and brushed my eyelashes.
The seal looked human at first. I thought someone was swimming. But then I stood on the edge, squinted and thought I know what that is … Its head was glossy, its eyes were round. Its body was freckled, slick.
Sea-hounds, Emmeline called them. For how they barked at night.
Or they are the souls of the drowned men … So Nathan said. He knew his stories and told them, from time to time.
Me? I liked Abigail’s version most of all. In her well-worn armchair and with her Earl Grey tea she unfolded her book called Folklore and Myth and said, in the beginning, when the world was made, the seals were given human hearts … I asked why – and she’d looked up, surprised. I don’t know why! It doesn’t matter why … What matters is that it says so. She tapped the page – see? I like this because it is fitting; it seems a tale that’s right. For seals are drawn to human voices, after all; they bask on rocks, human-like, and they have eyes that are expressive as human eyes can be and I might easily believe that seals speak our language and feel our private human pains. That they grieve as we do at the world’s sorrows – at its wars, famines, its loneliness and bombs.
Also, they can fall in love. There are tales of seals loving a person so much and so deeply that they wish for that human to join them, at sea. They wait, offshore. They sniff the salty air, and call. And so it has been a form of consolation, in the past: she didn’t drown, not really. Her soul lives with the seals, now … Where she is loved, and well-cared for. Where they dart, dapple-bodied, through shafts of light.
* * *
Abigail Coyle believes this. For her, it is the truth.
Her sister was loved by the seals. Thomasina was loved for she looked like them – with eyes so black that Abigail could see her own face looking back at her. She has a faded photograph that she keeps by her bed – both of them, in matching pinafores. They do not look like twins. They never did. Abigail is the shorter, plumper girl – her dress is straining at the buttons, and one sock is rolled down. Thomasina is taller, with her hair untied so that half of it covers those seal-eyes. But it does not hide the look of suspicion, the narrowed stare as if she does not trust this moment or the person who is saying good … Hold it … On the count of three …
Abigail turns in bed. She looks at this photograph now.
Thomasina. Who was openly called the beautiful one.
She drowned at fifteen. She floated in that pinafore – a damp, patchwork star. And she is buried in the ground but Abigail believes – knows – that her sister’s soul is not in Parla’s graveyard, in a wooden box. Instead, her soul – her, Thomasina’s true self – rolls with the seals that loved her, and which she loved in return. In that cave, they found her. Join us, they said, gentle-eyed. Come and swim at our side. So her twin sister – the elder by nine minutes, the taller by three inches and who could do backbends and walk on her hands – lowered her nose and mouth underwater, closed her eyes, and did.
Abigail pats the pillow. She sorts out the blankets, tucks them round her.
When she heard of this strange, bearded man, her first thought was of her twin. The sea is Thomasina’s. All things that come from it belong to her – the pearled insides of mussel shells, or a squid’s dark ink. And her second thought? It had been of a story she knew. Kept in a leather-bound book.
It has been a long time since she took Folklore and Myth of Parla, Merme and the Lesser Isles off the sitting-room shelf. But this evening she bent down to it, blew off its dust.
It was her mother’s book. In Abigail’s childhood, it was hauled off the shelf in Wind Rising after stormy days or days of such hardship that her mother cried. They read it at bedtime. Its pages were turned very slowly, and they sounded like a person saying hush, now … So many stories. Their mother read СКАЧАТЬ