‘You too.’
He let himself out of her house, and ran home, pumping cold, cold air into his lungs, calculating what he was going to pack and how much money he would need to find a way onto Skein Island.
Nobody would take him.
The afternoon sky began to darken, and the few fishermen left on the quay all told him the same thing: men weren’t allowed there; it wasn’t worth the money David was offering to break the rules; couldn’t he tell that a storm was coming? They were battening down the boats, and heading inside for the evening. But when David followed them into The Ship and Pilot, a small, grey pub set back from the harbour wall, he found a mass of old men with grizzled, suspicious faces, eyeing him as he stood in the doorway.
David took a few steps forward. The small fire in the grate was barely flickering, and the wood upon it hissed. Hanging from the ceiling, suspended with catgut, were dusty bottles containing delicate sailing ships built from matchsticks and tiny scraps of cloth. On the mantelpiece – one long stretch of dark, uneven wood – sat four small cubes. Red, blue, yellow, green. He felt the pull of them.
He stepped back, nearly fell over his own feet, and hurried outside, to their laughter.
In the harbour, the solitary boats were pulling at the hefty blue ropes that moored them, tossing their heads like horses at the approaching rain, visible over the channel. David stood against the thick sea wall and looked around, at the hills, pressing close. He couldn’t return to Wootton Bassett, not now he’d seen the cubes here. They were a secret that every other man somehow understood, and from which he had been excluded. Finding Marianne, conquering this adventure, was more important than ever. If he could solve one mystery, he could solve them all.
‘Night’s getting in.’
So he had been under observation; a young, heavy-set man was watching him from a small, blue fishing boat. A stuffed doll, like a scarecrow, was tied tight by its waist and neck to the prow. The man was heaving up a rope, hand over hand. David watched as an empty, crusted lobster pot, stinking of the bottom of the sea, broke free from the waves and was tossed on to the deck.
‘Will you take me out?’ David said. The scarecrow had been dressed in a blue overall and a sou’wester. In contrast, the young fisherman wore black jeans and a grey ski-jacket, modern, stylish. His long curly hair flopped around his ears in the wind.
‘I’m just putting her to bed.’ He didn’t have much of a local accent.
‘I’ll pay anything you like.’
‘Where do you want to go, eh? Night fishing?’
‘Skein Island.’
The fisherman laughed without making a sound. ‘You can’t get on there, mate.’
‘Just to look. From the boat. Just to sail round it once and come back again.’
‘It’ll be a rough ride.’
‘That’s fine,’ David said. He got out his wallet, sensing victory. ‘How much?’
‘We’ll do that later. Come over and put on a jacket.’ The man set out a metal walkway from the side of the boat to the quay, and David edged across its slippery surface.
He had sailed before, at South Cerney, when he was a teenager – a friend’s father had kept a boat moored there – but this grey sea, choppy with intention, was very different from that calm stretch of water. The boat bucked underneath his feet as they hit the mouth of the harbour, and as the rain picked up so did the swell of the waves. David stood next to the fisherman at the wheel in the tiny cabin, undecorated apart from a small ceramic mermaid placed on the sill of the window, her arms stretched up, exposing enormous breasts with red-tipped nipples. The wheel was turned first one way, then the other, apparently without thought, somehow making sense of the ocean.
‘Your wife out there, is she?’ The fisherman nodded. ‘We get ’em every now and again. Lovesick types, jealous types. You don’t look like the usual.’
‘What do they usually look like?’
‘Thick. It’s no good depending on women that way, is it? Either you’re on top or they are. Dog eat dog. Eat bitch.’
In a fit of pure malice David said, ‘Married, are you?’ already knowing the answer.
The man gave his silent laugh, shoulders shrugging. ‘You won’t catch me playing that game.’
‘That’s what they all say.’
‘You mean that’s what you used to say.’ He was right, of course. During A Levels, sitting around in the common room with their legs slung over the frayed arms of the chairs and a ghetto blaster playing rap or indie as loud as they dared, he and his friends had talked about girls as the enemy. To be overwhelmed, taken, given what for, then left if they became too demanding in some way that was never specified. It had felt expected of them to talk that way, no matter what they felt inside about themselves or their sexuality, which had to remain hidden from view. Women were seen as a mysterious foe back then, lying in wait across a wasteland of years, shrouded in fog. Not quite real.
‘There it is,’ said the fisherman.
Ahead, cliffs rose from the sea, close and dark. David watched the fisherman turn the wheel, and the boat struggled against the surging waves, drawing parallel to the island.
‘Once around and we’re heading back.’
David nodded. ‘I’ll just go out on the deck, get a better look.’
‘Hold on to the rail, then.’
He slid back the cabin door and stepped on to the deck. The rain and wind hit him like an attack; he braced himself, managed to close the door behind him, and gripped the rail, feeling terror of the deep seep into him.
Marianne was on that island, and he couldn’t get any closer. He had harboured visions of diving in, swimming across clear water with powerful strokes of his arms, to find her on the shore, waiting, with a look in her eyes that unmistakeably meant I love you. But the walls of the cliffs, the black rocks that surrounded them, were a rebuttal of his imaginings. He couldn’t see anything but the rock face.
He looked at his hands on the rail. The strength of them, holding on.
The man at the library had tried to make Marianne obey, bend to his will, and she had told him no. How had she done that? All the power in his body was nothing compared to her – her ability to change the situation, take life and shake it out, make it work out differently. His hands couldn’t hold her; the cubes had shown him that. A woman’s power to control men – Marianne, Mags, the damsel from the back room of The Cornerhouse – beat back the strength of his grip every time.
He let go of the rail.
At first he kept his balance, tilting his body to keep upright, riding the motion of the boat. Then it bucked, so hard and fast, like a bull underneath him, and his thighs hit the rail and his body went over, turning a full somersault into the rain. The liquid ice of the water encased him and froze him, instantly, leaving no way to move, no way to think. When he surfaced, sucking up a breath as huge as the sky, he realised his lifejacket was the only thing that had saved him, bringing him up to the surface.
What are you doing? said Marianne, quite clearly, in his ear. He couldn’t reply. The waves slapped his face, ripped at his hair and throat. The boat wasn’t close; he couldn’t see it anywhere. He tried to swim in a circle to catch sight of it, and couldn’t even manage that. The sea kept dragging him onwards, insistent, and suddenly a black rock loomed up at his face. He threw out his hands, caught it, felt the slam and the scrape of his body against it, couldn’t hold on, and was tossed back. Stinging ribbons of pain twined around his palms and wrists, and then he was thrown at the rock again. This time he didn’t get his arms out; his head connected with the rock, and there was no pain, no sea, no island. Just the sense that something had to be done, didn’t it have to be done? And Marianne saying, David, David, what are you doing? over and over in his left ear, her voice so sad, so sorry, that all he wanted was to hold her and tell her that everything was going to be—