Aymer found the fish more shocking than the cow. He was used to seeing fish on plates, cooked, gormless, dressed, not tumbling like molten lead, not smelling so. He retreated up the sand. He couldn’t help. He had only one arm. They posted him to stand with Whip next to their handcart, to keep birds off. No tumbril in Robespierre’s Paris could have been as bloody or macabre, or smelled as bad. He turned his back to it and looked along the shore, where turnstones and oyster catchers were picking through the beached and draining kelp. Aymer had seen these seaweeds many times before, and knew their names in Latin: Ascophyllum nodosum, Fucus vesicolosus, Laminaria cloustini. There was a folio in the offices of Smith & Sons, with over fifty specimens pressed, labelled and isolated on smooth sheets of white paper like doilies or like fans. When they were boys, Aymer and Matthias had learned to recognize each species. ‘I suppose that now,’ thought Aymer, ‘there’ll have to be a folio with specimens of Monsieur Leblanc’s common salt.’ He knew the shapes of the weeds, perhaps. But the colours were a shock. The folio seaweeds for all their dry and flattened delicacy were only brown and black. But on the beach the living kelp was as polished and as leathery as a prince’s boot, in mustards, crimsons, purples, tans. In the shallows, where the tide was frowning white round rocks and bars, the deeper kelps and wracks spread darkly on the surface, or danced arabesques in undulating groves of weed, like spirit-women at a ball in heavy satin frocks. Aymer looked beyond the kelp, beyond the figures in the sea, beyond the Belle abandoned in the suds, into the feeble, sombre sky. There was so little daylight left, that winter afternoon.
‘We’ll have to go now, Ralph,’ he called.
They left the Bowes to push their meaty handcart home alone, and set off with the dog, at a pace too fast for Aymer, towards Wherrytown. Miggy — her hands as red as two anemones — called out to them, ‘You’ve got to come again!’ Both men replied, ‘I will!’
At first, Ralph’s shoes made rodent noises as he walked. But soon the sea drained out of them. His legs and feet were wet and cold.
‘We’ve done a decent job today,’ said Aymer. ‘They’ll not want for meat.’
‘We have,’ said Ralph, smiling to himself.
‘Good women, too. That is, when one considers all the deprivations in their life. The daughter, don’t you think, might make a tolerable wife for a man? She has the country virtues.’ Ralph did not reply.
The path was level as it skirted round the bay, and soft underfoot. First there were dunes which shielded them from the cold and bloody solitudes of the seashore. Then there were salty flats with skew trees and flood-tide debris, and tracts of open, windblown heath where grasses mocked the sea with mimic waves and clapping stalks matched the distant, wet applause of tumbling pebbles in the tide. But soon they had to scramble over rocks, and Aymer, with one arm in a sling, made clumsy progress. Ralph waited on the headland for his companion to catch up. Someone had set a wooden bench across two rocks and Aymer, when he arrived, sat breathlessly on it, while Whip went rabbiting and Ralph displayed the patience of a sailor by carving ‘R.P.’ in the bench with his clasp knife. Other names were carved in it with dates: Thos. Pearson 1829; C. Stuart, Edinbgh. May ’33; Bartolli, Claudio, ROMA 1831. There were initials, too, with hearts and arrows. Aymer, motionless, was feeling cold and hungry and wearied by the ceaseless noise and wind. The inn was still two hours’ walk away. He’d allow himself a minute more of rest. He tried to make his weariness seem purposeful by identifying, for Ralph, the hornblende and the feldspar which added the white and flesh-red garnish to the granite thereabouts. He grubbed out coloured stones which enamelled the turf at his feet and rubbed them clean between his fingers. He broke free crusts of salt and mustard lichens. He murmured his familiarity with them, by naming them in Latin and in English. Ralph shook his head at his companion’s learning. ‘I don’t know names for those,’ he said. And then, ‘I do know other things …’ Ralph’s was a stranger’s ignorance. Aymer’s was a stranger’s knowledge.
A narrow side path led down from Aymer’s bench, through boulders, to a grassy bowl, and then rose steeply to a tonsured promontory where the granite was too exposed for ferns or lichen or algae. It was a perfect paradise of rocks, much loved, in summer, by watercolourists and lizards. But in the winter, with so much grey about and so little light, the dull pinks of the exposed stone were warm and beckoning. No child could pass it by without first attempting to climb the tumbled pyramid to reach the square mass at its summit. If it was natural masonry, then it had been weathered by a geometric wind and shaped by architectural frosts. This topmost block — the shape and size of a small stone cottage — rested with solid poise on the nipple of a flat but slightly rounded rock. If anyone sat, like Aymer, on the bench and stared for long enough it could seem the block was hovering an inch above the world. It had a tarred cross on its side.
‘So that’s the Cradle Rock,’ Aymer said, pointing.
‘What is the Cradle Rock?’
‘A rock that moves when it is pushed. Let’s go and see. I think we can afford the time.’ Even Aymer couldn’t pass it by.
They found a way between granite slabs marked by tarred arrows and climbed to the rounded platform where the Cradle Rock rested on its pivot. Reaching it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Aymer couldn’t find footholds. He had to accept the sailor’s hand around his wrist, and then his palm against his bottom. The Rock, they saw, was not a square on every side. Its hidden part was thinner and irregular. Ralph clambered up twelve feet or so and soon was standing on its summit, testing where the balance was. But Cradle Rock was so exactly poised that Ralph’s weight only deadened it. He couldn’t make it move. Both men searched the two sides where they could find safe footholds. At one point, on the southern face, the stone was worn away. The feet and shoulders of a thousand visitors had rubbed it bare.
‘Try here,’ Ralph said.
‘I’ll need both arms.’ Aymer shook off his sling and threw it to the ground. His shoulder didn’t hurt at all although his arm was a little stiff from its confinement in his coat. The wind picked up the sling and turned it once or twice, then took it on a seagull flight inland.
They put their backs against the naked stone, wedged their feet and pushed. At first their task seemed hopeless. But on their third and fourth attempts they sensed the softness of the mass. They moved across a foot or two and tried once more. Again the Rock seemed to give a quarter-inch against their backs. They found a rhythm to their exertions, with Ralph, experienced at team-work on the Belle, calling out, ‘And push! Let-her-go. And push! Let-her-go.’ The quarter-inch expanded on each push, and soon the Cradle Rock made grinding sounds as it ascended and declined at its own pace. Ralph and Aymer were redundant now. They stepped back to a safer spot and watched as eighty tons dipped and rose like a child’s cradle, with a displacement at its outer edges of nine or ten inches. Ralph was laughing at the joy of it. And Aymer, too, had seldom felt such unselfish pleasure. With just their backs, and half a dozen curses from the American, and some barks from Whip, they had rocked the grandest boulder on the coast. And left it rocking.