Sam, he repeats, will do it. Or Tab will. Leave it.
Constance watches him. And as always, when she watches him, she thinks he is my children’s father. She thinks, too, he’s my husband and that amazes her – that she is old enough to be married or that she was ever bold enough. But her first thoughts are of the children, always, who are not so childlike these days. Will Jonny have the same wide neck, when he’s older? Will Leah’s skin also wrinkle by her mouth, in time? They take after their father, she knows that – in their looks, and quiet ways.
She sips. Ian?
He makes a sound – annoyed. He wants to read the paper.
What does he look like? This man?
What?
This man from Sye. What does he look like?
She waits. Constance waits for the answer, and the longer she waits, the more she thinks I know what he looks like. She can guess.
Dark, he says, casually.
Skinned?
No – dark-haired. His skin’s pale.
Not old, then?
Late thirties, maybe. Early forties. Hard to tell.
Beard?
He looks up. Constance. It is his warning voice.
She meets his stare. She holds her gaze until he looks away. Perhaps what surprises her is not that she was bold enough to marry, but bold enough to marry him – Ian, whose temper was as known as the Anne-Rosa is. And like the Anne-Rosa, it was mistrusted and whispered of and could rise out of the darkness, slick with hanging weed. She’d been told of it. But Constance was never afraid. Once, just once, in their early days of marriage they had argued about the farm – what had it been? A broken machine? A sheepdog that was not learning? She cannot recall it now and perhaps it does not matter. But Ian had struck the wall. He’d given a single roar and slammed his fist against it so that the wall shook. That had silenced them both – from loud voices to a sudden, incredible hush in which Constance could hear the dust settling onto the floor. Hands on her knees, she examined the plasterwork – broken, powdering. Then she pulled on her shoes and, without a word, she walked down the lane towards the harbour – meaning, absolutely, to catch the ferry and make her way back to the mainland, to the town she grew up in and still missed sometimes. Ian followed, pleading. I’m so sorry … Stay. It never happened twice. On that quayside, Constance turned to her husband and vowed – swore with gritted teeth and her hand to her chest – that she would leave him for good if he ever struck another thing. Anything, Ian – the wall, the dog, a pillow, her. I promise. Do you understand me? Yes, he understood her; Constance always keeps her word. And he has shouted since, and he’s slammed doors, and once, having argued with Nathan, he kicked the rainwater barrel with such power that it ruptured and the rush of water sent the chickens running in the way that chickens do – as if the world is ending. Ian can curse like no-one else she knows. And it is blunt, unimaginative swearing so that she winces. But that’s all he’s done, in twenty-four years. It is all he’ll ever do.
Constance drinks her orange juice.
There is the drip of the kitchen tap.
Someone needs to tell Emmeline, she says, and pads out of the room.
It is the peonies she loves. She has always been told that the island’s weather and its salt and thin soil would not suit them, that peonies could not grow on Parla. But she has grown them. She has tended them, and hoped, and here they are now. They grow in a cluster, facing south. Their pinkness makes her heart fill up, each time. When she walks back along the lane towards Easterly she sees them, and smiles – and it is like coming home to a person, she thinks. It is like being greeted. It is like a hello.
Emmeline kneels beside them. She holds a watering can and wears her sheepskin slippers. Beautiful, she tells them. You are doing very well.
It is one of the small benefits of living on her own: she can grow the flowers she has always longed to. Thirty years ago, any flowers she tried for were crushed by footballs and children’s feet; fifteen years ago, she would have looked out of the window on a Sunday as she cooked the roast dinner for Jack and wished that she could be out in the flowerbeds with a trowel and a bag of manure, rather than sieving the gravy. She called it a woman’s lot, back then. People matter more than flowers, of course. But now she has the time – at last. Foxgloves and hydrangeas. And she loves her peonies.
Emmeline stands, looks out to sea. The unending sea. She grew up in the lighthouse. Her, her parents and Tabitha had lived in one of the three houses at the lighthouse’s base, so that the sea was so close and so loud that it felt like a fifth person – a family member who was never far away. Her earliest memory is being shown the pots of paraffin whilst licking the butter off a currant bun; her second earliest is polishing the lens. And she had loved her lighthouse life. She’d loved winding the weights back up to the top of the stairs, and learning Morse code, and she had loved the view so much that she’d dreamed of keeping the light herself one day. Emmeline Bright – with her own jacket and hat. But lighthouse-keeping was never seen as woman’s work. When she married Jack Bundy at eighteen, she left the lantern behind her. She moved south and inland, into the farm called Wind Rising. From light and high seas to a dark-roomed house; from saltwater to sheep. Only half a mile from one life to the other, but those had been such different lives. And how many years had she walked through the creaking rooms of Wind Rising, with its missing roof tiles and open fire which threw smoke into the sitting room when the wind shifted itself? Long enough. Those years of smelling of sheep, of wedging paper under the uneven legs of chairs. All four children were born in that house, or near it. All of them were late to show their faces except Tom – of course. Tom leapt out early, as if too excited to wait.
She pushes fertiliser into the earth. Easterly – like all names on Parla, its name is forthright, brusque. It is simple – as if we are all fools and need to be told plainly. She, Jack and their youngest child moved here when it became free. A man called Strutt – a mainlander, sullen, bad teeth and bad manners – had died during those wild winter storms of nearly thirty years ago, and Emmeline had carried cardboard boxes of toys, books, bed linen, clothes and kitchen utensils over to Easterly in the following spring. Ian, as the eldest son, stayed at Wind Rising. He had been twenty-three that March. He took on the farm, with Nathan to help him – as boys were meant to, back then. They had no choice in it, really, for their father had started his heart trouble in the autumn before and could no longer farm. It had changed Jack – that shock, the air ambulance and the diet that was forced upon him left him a weaker man who could no longer haul sheep onto their rumps to shear them, or change tractor tyres. And Hester had already met George Moss. So Ian and Nathan became real farmers; and Emmeline, Jack and young Tom moved over the fields to this easterly place.
She counts on her fingers. Tom had been thirteen years old.
Those were my best years. Perhaps she should say that her best years were the first few of her marriage, or when all her children were young – but that’s not the truth. She loved the days when her eldest boys were farmers, men in their twenties who were strong and well-made and living their own lives, men who’d kiss their mother’s hair when they came in to see her but who went into her fridge without asking as if they were still small boys. She’d smiled, at that. Hester was in love – blooming with it. And Tom had spent his days running through fields or on beaches, coming back in the evenings with his pockets filled with shells or feathers or mussels for eating and with a head filled with stories. Mum, guess what I heard? She loved how he smelled.