A Running Tide Read online

  He couldn’t work out what was the matter with him. He never used to feel like this. Despite his love for his family, why was it that he suddenly felt so suffocated by them? Even by Tirza. A nerve in his eyelid began to twitch, a maddening uncontrollable movement which was new and alien to him. It afflicted him sometimes in school, too, when he would lean his head on his hand, pretending to concentrate, in a desperate effort to hide this weird disfigurement from his classmates. Now his legs were twitching. Was this what his mother meant when she talked about growing pains? He drove his fists on to his knees under the table, forcing his legs down so that the heels of his boots would not start drumming on the floor. He felt sick.

  Tirza was sitting opposite, but showed no sign of noticing anything peculiar about him. She was gazing vacantly off into space, an irritating habit she had when she wanted to detach herself from her surroundings.

  A couple of months ago he had asked her, ‘What do you do when you look like that?’

  She had seemed confused. ‘I don’t know. I sort of go away inside my head. Don’t you ever do that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You just float off, till everything around you is small and far away, and people’s voices go faint. Then you can be private.’

  He had shaken his head, not understanding what she meant then, any more than he did now. The nearest he ever came to this detachment from the surrounding world was when he was reading a Zane Grey. Then sometimes he really didn’t hear his father calling him to do his chores. But he couldn’t just escape at will, the way Tirza did. She could be infuriating sometimes.

  ‘More dessert, Simon?’ Abigail said, the big serving spoon poised over the remains of a steamed pudding thick with suet and syrup. Abigail’s mother had come from Lancashire, and Abigail took pride in keeping up her culinary traditions. The roof of Simon’s mouth was still thick with the residue of his first helping. He shook his head.

  ‘No, thank you, Grandma.’

  Only Nathan accepted a second helping, pouring a generous ribbon of yellow cream over the top. Even in winter Tobias’s cows produced this rich cream. In summer you could almost stand a spoon up in it.

  Simon’s right leg began to twitch again, and he eased himself round cautiously in his chair, but his grandmother was too sharp-eyed for him.

  ‘Sakes, what’s the matter with the boy? Sit still, will you, Simon.’

  ‘Cramp,’ said Simon tersely. ‘Could I please leave the table, Grandma? I’ve got cramp real bad in my leg.’

  ‘Really badly. Oh, very well, then.’ Abigail glanced along the table. ‘Harriet?’

  ‘Oh surely. Let them both go off. Then we can all have a good visit with our coffee.’

  Simon caught Tirza’s eye. Wherever it was that she had been, she’d come back again and was inhabiting the space behind her eyes. They got up hastily and escaped from the long room, which was kitchen at one end and dining room at the other.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Simon, looking at the pendulum clock on the wall at the foot of the stairs, next to the barometer, ‘I thought we’d be there all day. It’s near time to go to the Boston ladies’ house.’

  ‘Another half an hour. Come and see Stormy Petrel.’

  The catboat was the great passion of Tirza’s life. She had saved every penny she earned for three years to buy the Stormy Petrel – her allowance, money for baby-sitting with Joey next door, all her earnings from her crab-fishing and the occasional pay Tobias gave them both for special tasks like strawberry picking. Simon had to allow she deserved credit for it. He had never been able to save for longer than a few weeks, in the anxious penurious times before Christmas. During the months while she was saving, Tirza had somewhere come across the information that stormy petrels stay out over the ocean for months at a time, even sleeping on the wing, so she had christened her boat thus outlandishly instead of giving her a regular Maine name like Fair Weather or Linda Sue.

  The boat shed was built on to the side of the house and they could reach it without going outside. A door opened from the dark back hall straight into the shed and they stepped down to the shed floor as Tirza switched on the dim electric light. The shadowy space felt like Tobias’s ice-house when it had just been filled with the freshly cut blocks of ice – their frosty breath hung thick around them. Nathan kept his lobsterboat, the Louisa Mary, in the water until the harbour iced over, then winched her on to the wharf. He brought her into the boat shed just before spring for her annual overhaul. From the big doors at the front of the boat shed a slipway ran straight across the road and into the harbour, down which she could be launched when the ice broke. But at the moment there was no room for the lobsterboat in the shed. Two dories – Nathan’s large one, once used on a whaling ship, and the small one belonging to Tirza – were upturned on trestles at the far side. They had been sanded down and repainted. In the centre of the shed Stormy Petrel was lovingly cradled on canvas-covered supports curved to fit her. Tirza had already scraped the bottom and put on three layers of worm-resistant paint. Now the boat was right way up and had been painted with undercoat. The spars were laid out separately and Simon ran his hand along the mast. It had been rubbed down with finer and finer sandpaper until it felt as silky as a thoroughbred horse.

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Must have taken hours.’

  ‘Yeah. But I really like doing it, you know. It’s real satisfying, getting it so smooth. Not much more to do now. I just need to put a couple of top coats on the outside of the hull, and give the cockpit and spars three coats of marine varnish, and I’ll be finished.’

  ‘Sail OK?’

  ‘Sure. Except I have to shape a new batten to replace the one you cracked when you stepped on it last fall.’

  ‘I said I was sorry.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re cut out for boats.’

  ‘I guess my feet just got too big.’

  ‘I wish Grandma would let me work on the boat on Sundays,’ said Tirza. ‘It’s freezing in here evenings after school; my hands go stiff after half an hour. And there are so many chores on Saturdays.’

  Simon gestured round at the lobster pots which were piled up in the half-loft and on every available foot of floor space, and at the nets slung in tar-scented festoons from the roof.

  ‘Is there much work to do on your father’s gear?’

  ‘The pots aren’t too bad this year, but there’s one big rip in the net that you’re going to help me mend next weekend.’

  ‘OK, I remember. Come on, I’m turning into a block of ice. Let’s go and visit with the Boston ladies.’

  The snowstorm had slackened a little as they made their way back round the harbour in the direction of the church, then turned off up the steep path leading to the Penhaligons’ house. The path wound between box hedges clipped in the European style, topped now with a layer of snow like cake frosting. The house itself had a French look, with its mansard roof. But the deep porch running along the whole length of the front was New England, and the roof supported a stumpy turret crowned with a wrought-iron waist-high balustrade. A widow’s walk, where a wife could climb up to watch for her husband’s ship returning from the ocean, sighting the distant sail with joy or searching the grey charnel house of the waves until hope perished.

  Simon kicked up gouts of snow as they walked towards the house. The Boston ladies expected folks to come to the front door, even their younger visitors.

  ‘Sometimes I can’t wait to get out of this place.’

  Tirza stopped and looked at him in surprise.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Out of Flamboro. Away from the farm.’

  She looked baffled.

  ‘But it will be yours some day. When your dad retires.’

  ‘I don’t know as I want it. I don’t think I want to be a farmer.’

  Tirza walked on again towards the house, but she pulled off her mitten and began to bite her thumbnail.

  ‘What would you do instead?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know wha
t I want to do. Do you know what you want to do when you’re grown? Do you want to stay here all the rest of your life?’

  She stopped again and looked down the sloping garden towards the wharf, where she could just make out the Louisa Mary through the swirling snow. The lobsterboat was heavy with ice, every surface coated, the rigging turned into tubes of glass. Like every winter, this one had locked in the harbour with ice, putting a stop to fishing until it thawed. The ice was piled up in irregular masses, fastened on to the wharves and the rocks with a grip that nothing would loosen until spring. Then they would begin their agonised break-up, crashing together like trains colliding head-on. Even when it seemed to be at rest, the ice twisted and tore at the land, dragging huge boulders from the shoreline and wrenching the oak legs of wharves from the sea-bed like a fistful of kindling.

  The water was a sullen grey beyond the ice, dull as old pewter, giving back no light today but towering into menacing seas which burst upwards into spumes of spray above hidden reefs. The ocean disappeared into the snow and no line could be seen between sky and sea. Even the lights on the far ends of the two harbour walls were shrouded. The heavy blocks of ice in the harbour groaned and scraped as the sea sucked at them.

  This was a cruel country, but Tirza could not imagine any other. And she thought of summer days, under-running a trawl in her dory, or sailing Stormy Petrel along the coast to Todd’s Neck with the sun beating down on her back. And she thought of the sweet smell of the cows in their barn, and the fierce jet of the milk into the pail at milking time. And haymaking. And blueberry harvest.

  ‘Of course I want to stay here,’ she said angrily. ‘Why not? Where else would be as good as here?’

  ‘What will you do?’ He kept picking at it, like a crusted and itching scab. ‘You can’t take over your dad’s lobsterboat. Whoever heard of a lobsterwoman? They’d never let you have a licence.’

  He was jeering at her now, trying to shake her out of her old certainties. She opened her mouth to answer him, but at that moment Miss Molly appeared at the door beckoning to them.

  ‘My heart alive, come in the both of you! Why are you standing out there in the blizzard?’

  Captain Penhaligon had been a much travelled and a cultured man, and when he had built this house for his wife and daughters more than seventy years ago he had provided for every need. There was a library lined with panelling, where books rose to the ceiling on all four walls, with barely room for the fireplace and the two long windows. The house had a drawing room as well as the front parlour. One end of the drawing room served as a music room, housing a Steinway grand piano and a small Irish harp brought back from Cork, which no one in Flamboro could play. The three sisters lived mostly in the front parlour, with its precious Persian carpet. There were display cabinets around the walls holding the captain’s curiosities from a lifetime at sea – squat stone goddesses from islands of the Pacific and ivory fans from India, child-sized embroidered shoes worn by Chinese ladies and a narwhal tusk, once believed to be the horn of the fabulous unicorn. The floor between the chairs was dotted with various worktables and sewing baskets from which current projects overflowed. A round oak table on a single pedestal leg was laid this afternoon with an embroidered cloth and a fragile Royal Crown Derby tea service.

  Despite appearances Flamboro knew that – though the Boston ladies were not poor – they found the times hard. The captain had left no capital for maintaining the house, and his pension from the shipping line had died with him. Miss Molly’s husband, the doctor, had been a man dedicated to serving the immigrant community in Boston’s poorer districts. Miss Catherine’s husband, the businessman, had lost everything in the Wall Street crash. He had struggled on for a time, working in humble positions for other men, but after falling ill he had turned his back on life. Yet the sisters’ financial difficulties were partly of their own making. They would have considered it unpardonable to have sold any of the captain’s possessions in order to make their lives easier. So they lived off the minute investments given to each of them in their youth, eating bread and cheese with Georgian silver from Royal Worcester plates, and drinking water from priceless colonial ale glasses.

  Mrs Penhaligon, the captain’s wife, remembered still by a few of the older inhabitants of Flamboro, had been a formidable woman, who believed that waste and idleness were signs of the devil’s work. All her daughters had been reared to spend every moment not otherwise filled with domestic duties on useful plain needlework. But the sisters had all inherited, perhaps from the captain, an artistic eye and creative talent. Miss Molly made the best patchwork quilts in the State of Maine, turning good scraps from worn-out clothes into works of art. Miss Catherine embroidered. And Miss Susanna was the rug-maker. She always had both a braided rug and a hooked rug in the making.

  ‘One for work and one for pleasure,’ said Miss Susanna, who regarded braiding rugs as useful but uninspiring. Her hooked rugs were famous for their intricate patterns and rich colours.

  It was never acknowledged publicly that the Penhaligon sisters sold any of their work – unthinkable even to suppose it. But Mrs Larrabee, who ran the fancy goods and gift store in Flamboro, open only from June to August, would occasionally drop a hint to one of the more favoured summer people that she might be able to arrange something privately. The best of the sisters’ work, however, adorned their home and those of their friends.

  An invitation to tea with the Boston ladies was an invitation to explore the delights of the house, which always seemed to offer up something new, and to discuss the latest piece of needlework. Today Simon and Tirza were instructed to lift the round table close to the fire, and the five of them sat down to a dainty tea of bread and butter with blueberry jam, followed by one of Miss Catherine’s lemon cakes which were so light on the plate they seemed to weigh nothing at all.

  Tirza was still thinking about Simon’s words as she finished her cake, and she began to chew her thumbnail again.

  ‘Tirza,’ said Miss Molly, ‘a lady does not put her fingers into her mouth.’

  ‘Sorry, Miss Molly.’ Tirza sat on her hands to stop herself.

  ‘How was the skating yesterday?’ said Miss Catherine. ‘I hear you all went up to Gooseneck Lake.’

  ‘It was great,’ said Tirza. ‘We had a big campfire and cooked over it.’

  ‘Do you remember,’ said Miss Susanna, ‘the winter of ‘87? Father hired an orchestra from Portland, and we had pitch torches all round the lake, shining like huge lightning bugs in the dark. They played waltzes and polkas, and the party went on past midnight.’

  She laughed softly.

  ‘Remember the sleighs, coming to fetch us home? The horses cantering out across the ice, with their hooves ringing – black silhouettes against the torch flames... the moonlight glinting on the harness and the bells chiming. They were wild and skittish with the frosty air. We raced each other back through the woods. Oh, we had some high old time!’

  ‘Give me a hand to lift the table away to the corner, Simon,’ said Miss Catherine. ‘Yes, I remember that winter. Everard Tremayne was sweet on you, and wouldn’t let another young man near. He even came down Maine to spend the winter.’

  Miss Susanna smiled. ‘Ah well, he was a fine-looking man. But it came to nothing.’

  ‘Susanna was the prettiest of us all,’ said Miss Molly. ‘Kitty and I used to be so jealous of her curls.’

  ‘You’ve nothing to be jealous of now.’ Miss Susanna laughed again, touching the grey hair which still held a trace of those curls. Her skin was very pale, and her face had grown thinner than ever this winter, but her blue eyes still glinted with mischief.

  ‘Now, I want your opinion on my new rug.’ She started to rise from her chair by the fire, but Miss Catherine moved quickly to forestall her and carried over the inlaid work cabinet in which she kept her rug-making tools and scraps. Miss Molly lifted the lid of a window-seat and brought the burlap backing for the new rug to spread out beside the fireplace. The pattern was marked ou
t in thick ink which would be hidden by the close pile of hooked strips when the rug was finished. It showed an oak tree, detailed and precise. The border was a garland of oak leaves, studded with acorns. Under the tree a squirrel sat up eating an acorn and the head of another peered through the branches. Around the base of the tree were clusters of native Maine flowers.

  Miss Susanna laid pieces of woollen fabric across the shawl which was tucked around her legs. Moss green and lime, coppery brown and gold and tawny. They were pieces from her neighbours’ old skirts and jackets, but in her hands they would be blended as an artist blends his paints.

  ‘What do you think, Tirza? These two together – do you think they will be right for the squirrels?’

  Monday meant school again. Although the snow had stopped falling, the children from the inland farms did not arrive. Simon came late, but Miss Julia Bennett, the new assistant teacher, did not give him a bad conduct mark, making allowances for the weather. Tirza knew he could have arrived on time, because the coastal track from the farm always scoured clean of snow when the wind was blowing from the north-east. But Simon had seemed so peculiar yesterday, talking about leaving home and not wanting the farm, that she held her tongue when he sat down across the aisle from her in the desk he shared with Wayne Pelham.

  Simon and Tirza were in the same class, despite there being nearly a year’s difference between them. At three years old Tirza had started to read, and devoured anything she came across from that moment on – the Sears and Roebuck catalogue, Tobias’s farming magazine, Abigail’s church circular. To keep her occupied when he was lobstering, and out from under his mother’s feet, Nathan had sent her to school a year early, before she was even five, and she had gone up through the years with the boys and girls a year older than she was. There were sixteen of them, nine girls and seven boys, which meant that one boy and one girl had to share a desk. Until this year, eighth grade, Tirza and Simon had shared. She had never really thought of him as a boy, he was just Simon, but when school had started last September, he had avoided the girls and taken the seat next to Wayne. Dismayed, Tirza had looked around for a partner. She didn’t want to share with any of the other boys. But then Eileen Potts, who was sweet on Johnny Flett, Charlie Flett’s nephew, had invited him with a look to join her. The others sorted themselves out and Tirza found herself paired with Wilma Potts, Eileen’s cousin, who sniffed all the time and carried around with her a smell of musty rooms, mouldy food and her father’s pigsty.