THE BOOK OF LEAH

In the beginning, I considered peroxide.

The woman and her daughter who arrived on the June ship were my inspiration, the shock they sent through the congregation when they stood to receive the host for the first time. No one said anything aloud, of course. People would pat my head for luck in the Provisions Store and mutter blessings in my ear (a ‘pure catch’ they called me, even though there was a distinct lack of fishermen to be doing the netting), but voicing this kind of lore in chapel, admitting that you believed in a set of mysteries and superstitions beyond the bible – that was a step too far. Still, I knew their thoughts – this woman and her daughter were inviting catastrophe upon us with their flaming locks.

What a thrill.

I began to wonder if I, simply by altering the colour of my hair, could also bring about a change. If I went from black to white-blonde, transformed into my negative image, who would I be then? Would I also welcome in catastrophe?

Would catastrophe be preferable to nothing at all?

But let the record show, it was not Ben’s arrival that caused Miss Cedars to disappear.

I had grown tired of playing her – because that is how it had come to feel, like a role upon the stage. Miss Cedars, the sweet, keen teacher of the senior years, the spinster nearing her ancient thirties, the one who had taken tenancy of the centre harbour cottage when everyone knew it was reserved for a young, married couple, people who could be trusted to go forth and multiply, earning themselves a property on the south elevation with extra bedrooms.

The loss of my first name had come to upset me. It had been deftly cut away as soon as I began teaching.

‘No one will call you “Leah” anymore,’ Ruth French had cautioned me. ‘Not even the adults. It’ll be, Morning, Miss Cedars, and, Will we get a break in the clouds, d’ya think, Miss Cedars?’

She had been three years above me at school, and was three years ahead of me in her teaching training. I assumed she was taking the opportunity to be superior – you never really leave the playground, after all – but she was right. I became Miss Cedars. Only Miss Cedars.

‘Ah, you thought the likes of us would be exempt?’ she said with a wink.

Ruth was a blackhead too, and while not a daughter of the Council, her colouring gave her some status. She was never bothered with ear-blessings and head-patting, though. She shared a house on the lower, less desirable stretch of the south elevation with Catherine ‘Cat’ Walton, the assistant curate with the spiky hair. Ruth wasn’t a ‘pure catch’ like me. During her appraisals in Mr Crane’s office, I wondered if he made her read the passage from Leviticus that warned of abomination.

I had become desperate for a shift in the way I was seen, to be known as Leah once more. Not compliant Leah from the good book, the one who raises children as a consolation when her husband takes her better-loved sister as another wife. Not that Leah. Not Leah the dope. I would be Leah with the tender eyes who goes to bed with Laban and deceives him into marrying her in the first place, convincing him in the dark, with her naked body, that she is as desirable as her too-perfect sister, Rachel.

True to form, I lost my nerve. I waited in line upstairs at the Counting House to use one of the computers (the school internet being strictly off limits for ordering goods from the mainland) and hovered the mouse over the ‘buy’ button beside a bottle of peroxide. Then I clicked away and bought myself a skirt instead. It was blue, with pleats and a mermaid shine. A daring choice, or perhaps a cowardly one.

Ben was merely a catalyst. Let’s say that. He was a channel.

The Autumn term was rolling close – my favourite time of the year. Clean stationery, a fresh set of faces staring back from the front row of desks. In the replenishing sun of July and August, lying back on the harbour beach, I would reread the set texts – Lord of the Flies, Gulliver’s Travels, The Tempest – stories we hoped might connect with the pupils. Then I would arrange an informal meeting about the year ahead over a glass of shandy at the Anchor. (A ‘wam-bam’ was what cute Miss Cedars called it.) Ruth French would be there to represent the juniors, her demeanour softened by two months of warm winds. Dellie Leven, the senior assistant, would bring a tin of something sweet from her stockpile of summer baking. My enthusiasm would spill across the table, enough for the three of us.

‘We should hold some classes on the lawn overlooking the East Bay. It would really bring the subject alive!’

Every year I’d say it, always able to forget that the balminess and the clear skies were transient guests, small birds that would soon fly back to their real home. The fog crept up on you. Perhaps it is a measure of the human capacity for hope, or for self-deception, that I was able to believe the weather might, for once, that year, be different. By mid-September you could lose sight of your own feet on the coastal paths, and when the rains came, they did not mess around: they swung in hard. The idea of holding any kind of lesson outside was ridiculous. And that year I did not suggest it. I called no wam-bam. My copy of Lord of the Flies lay on the floorboards of my bedroom by my slippers, unread, its pages curling in the damp, gathering a musty smell like everything did if kept for more than a few days away from daylight. The island was a sponge, the sea seeping into the corners of every house.

I took my malaise to Margaritte next door; how could I ever have explained this strange wave of melancholy to Dr Bishy? Tuesdays were my evenings with Margaritte. I drew the curtains while she lit a stick of incense with shaking hands, the glow of the match revealing the thinness of her long white hair. We’d settle down opposite one another at the green-baize-topped table, as if we were going to do something as innocuous as play a hand of poker. We’d have a glass or two of Margaritte’s home-brewed wine, swap the news that so often fell through the gaps between our generations, and then, almost as an afterthought, she would read my palm and deal out my future.

She knew what troubled me. Everyone was going. Everyone had gone. All four of my childhood friends and then, that year, my little brother, Paul. He didn’t even wait for the return leg of the August ship, the last ship of the year, the one you were supposed to take for long-time leaving if you didn’t want to tempt fate. So desperate was he for the possibilities of the mainland, that he took the first ship in April, the day after his twenty-first birthday. Mum and Dad, inexplicably, said nothing to make him stay.

This was the root cause of Miss Cedars’ disappearance, of her slow evaporation. My elders had always told me that wanderlust was nothing but an unhealthy quirk of the genes – like original sin, it could be beaten back and conquered – but Paul was strong enough for the fight. He left, and my faith went with him. The colour of all my memories faded. Those days lost trekking across estate land for the best horse-chestnut trees, pockets full of shining conkers. See a black bird and you can’t speak again until you see a white one. Forfeit is to throw three conkers at the high, mullioned windows of the Big House and risk waking up the Earl. Pink sunsets on the cobbles for the June cook-out. The lick-slap of the sea against the harbour wall. The smell of mackerel on the fire. Weeks spent in collusion on our effigy of St Jade, her construction never withstanding the door-to-door singing. One year her nose falls off; another, her arm. The next, more appropriately, her foot. Laughing until we couldn’t breathe.

Miss Cedars was renowned on Lark for preaching the word of the island to anyone who even mooted the idea of leaving. She kept on preaching right up until they walked the gangplank.

‘It’s all right for you,’ my friends would reply gnomically, and I thought I understood them. I was different – I had my teaching post, I enjoyed privileges as the daughter of the gamekeeper, I was more at one with the land than them, but still I fought back.

‘You won’t find a place on earth as beautiful or as special as here.’ My passion was hard to articulate; something always stoppered my throat. ‘Lark is not the problem,’ I told them, ‘because we are Lark. We are its future. We are its blood.’ I believed that.

Yet, when Paul said he was going, my mouth ran dry. He knew how wonderful the place was; he had lived it all alongside me.

‘Maybe you should come too,’ he said, and what on earth was I supposed to reply to that?

Margaritte turned over the card that signified my immediate future. The Knight of Cups. In the low, campfire voice she affected when doing her readings (not at all the voice she used when offering more wine), she told me, ‘And here comes your love.’

I turned away, else I might cry.

Margaritte’s shelves beside me were filled with books that she believed contained the true voice of the island, untainted by the prophets and evangelists who had washed up on our shores over the years. Titles such as Past Lives: The Basics, Cosmic Ordering: A Higher Level, The Truth Within the Runes – so much contraband in plain sight. She had created a circle of invisibility around her books and objects, she said. No one could see them unless she allowed it.

‘You really believe that?’ I’d scoffed.

‘Do you believe that a man turned water into wine?’ she replied. ‘That he spat in the eyes of the blind to cure them? That he could walk on the surface of the sea?’

I paused. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, which was a startling admission.

‘I do,’ Margaritte replied. ‘I know it’s possible.’

In the light of day, I believed that the creases on my palm signified nothing more than the way I clenched my fist. The outcome of the cards was as arbitrary as the roll of a dice. I was convinced by the messages only in the moment they were delivered, fleetingly. Once the reading was over, after Margaritte had knocked on the deck to rid it of me, walked three times round the room anti-clockwise and opened up the curtains, I returned to the idea that it was all silly, childish, harmless.

But, the Knight of Cups …

‘Ha!’ I managed in response to her prediction. I tried for lightness. ‘Well, if the sky falls in!’

Margaritte tapped out a thoughtful rhythm on the shoulder of the Knight’s horse with a crooked finger, her nail thick and painted. I didn’t want to look at him, that warrior in his winged helmet, golden chalice in hand. He was false hope.

‘What are you saying – that I’m about to fall in love with Saul Cooper?’ I gave a short laugh. ‘Because he’s the only one left and he’s old! Almost forty!’

Margaritte did not smile.

‘He’s come to us reversed,’ she said, nodding sagely. This card was upside-down beside the others. ‘He’s a charming fraud sometimes, our Knight of Cups. A man who can’t separate truth from the lies he tells himself.’

I waited for more.

She shook her head, shook away her doubt. ‘But he’s between two cards of good fortune so my instinct is to trust him.’ At last, she smiled. ‘Let’s see who the August ship brings in, shall we?’

So, I became optimistic, buoyant, despite all efforts not to be. I thought idly of making a visit to the Customs House. Not to ask Saul Cooper for his hand in marriage – the mere idea of him, those small, ferrety features, his particular aroma of fishermen’s mints and unwashed armpits – but I would go to him and request a look at August’s incoming passenger list.

Again, my nerve deserted me. Or rather, rationality won out. Saul would take huge delight in my enquiry. He’d wear that thin-lipped smirk, the one that suggested he had material on you, pictures, things he would share on men’s nights at the Anchor without hesitation – because it was said that he was the keeper of a stash of magazines, the odd VHS from the mainland, things that men liked to look at, boys, those who were willing to risk God’s wrath.

‘What do you want to know for?’ Saul would have sing-songed at my asking, a hard brown sweet doing a dance across his gums. If I’d found a convincing response, his next question would be, ‘And what do I get in return for showing you?’

So, I waited. News would reach me once the ship had docked. It had no distance to travel.

We were in the staff room on a prep day before the start of term when Miriam Calder announced it proudly, apropos of nothing: ‘He has a specialism in science, you know.’ Our school administrator was spooning sugar into a cup of tea she’d prepared for Mr Crane. ‘A specialism,’ she went on, ‘that he will be sharing across the whole school.’

Ruth French and I were sitting on the low, soft chairs, piles of folders on the table in front of us. We snapped up our heads.

‘Sorry, did you say “he”?’

It was Ruth who asked; my mouth was wide open in disbelief.

Never, in my living memory, had there been a male teacher at St Rita’s. A male headteacher, yes. Before Mr Crane came Mr Bartle, who died just before I moved up to the senior classes. But a man serving as mere teacher alone… ? Mr Crane had been deputy to Mr Bartle in the years leading up to his death – he was preparing to take over, the outgoing head expected to retire, not die – but Mr Crane had done no time in front of the whiteboard then. I could only draw up memories of him speaking from the front in chapel, and of him standing at Mr Bartle’s shoulder in his office. You needed to travel back fifty years, and several feet along the row of framed school photos in the main corridor, to find another male face looking out from that teachers’ middle row.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Miriam, relishing this eking-out of information, ‘our new staff member is most definitely a man. Did you not know?’

We didn’t. She knew we didn’t. We knew that Mr Crane had found no new likely candidate for teacher training on the island – an offer I had in my time seized on breathlessly, aged eighteen, ending the terrifying idea that I would need to go to the mainland to find a career. There is an invisible line on Lark dividing those who live by their intelligence and those who lean on physical abilities. I was able to rig up a snare and raise the game by beating, all useful to my gamekeeper father – everyone on Lark had a second skill – but my true strength was my brain.

‘Will you actually be a real teacher?’ Paul had asked. Eleven years old and he thought he knew it all. ‘Don’t you have to go away and do a degree for that?’

I had made sure, when it arrived, that Mum framed and mounted my curlicued certificate of qualification prominently in the living room.

In this instance, Mr Crane had placed an advertisement in a mainland newspaper, generating interest beyond the recruitment pages, as our sporadic call-outs always did. Miriam had pinned a resulting press article to our staff noticeboard:

A 1,500-mile commute, a class of four students, one pub and a single shop – could this be the remotest teaching job on the planet? Lying so far adrift in the North Atlantic, the island of Lark is unreachable by air or sea for five months of the year. Its temperamental climate is one of warm winds followed by dense, persistent fog, making it truly the ostracised cousin of the British Isles…

Miriam had crossed out ‘five months’ and corrected it to ‘seven months’ in the margin of the press clipping. A strange point of pride. There followed several paragraphs of inaccurate history and patronising anecdotes collected from tourists and expatriates – traitors – alongside some anodyne words from the teacher we’d recruited last summer – Amy Sparks. She didn’t manage a year, exiting on the same April ship as my brother, staying just long enough to get over the failed relationship she’d crossed hundreds of miles of sea to escape. Long enough to think better of their split in light of the romantic prospects on Lark. Long enough for me to consider her a friend.

‘But don’t you miss all the shops, Leah?’ That was her parting excuse. No mention of Lark’s awe-inspiring landscape, the closeness of its community, the sunrises, only its lack of a high street.

‘You can’t miss something you’ve never experienced,’ I said, the statement feeling immediately flawed, as wrong as a stone in the mouth.

A wedding invitation from her arrived on the August ship, which seemed like the cruellest of jokes.

‘You’re scared of the mainland!’ she had said to me once, teasingly, thinking she had uncovered my naughtiest secret. ‘You only talk about loving Lark so much because you’re such a chicken!’ Miles of sea between us and still she was taunting me.

The article in the mainland press was illustrated by our most recent end-of-year photo. Caption: The entire pupil population – all 38 of them! I look it up sometimes, that article, study the expressions of the three Eldest Girls on the back row – Britta, Anna, Jade-Marie. I search their faces for hints. Was it happening already? Was the idea in them then? But they seem as upright and guileless as the very small ones sitting cross-legged on the front row.

‘Oh, yes, he’s most definitely a man,’ Miriam went on. ‘Quite a dishy one at that.’

Ruth grunted at this turn in the conversation. ‘Wow,’ she muttered. ‘A man. I never saw that coming, did you, Miss Cedars?’

My throat closed tight, sure that Ruth knew; had she spied on us through a gap in Margaritte’s curtains, dabbling with the cards, predicting his arrival? Ruth went back to labelling folders, and I took her phrasing to be accidental, a coincidence.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I really didn’t.’

I tried to match her nonchalance, but my pulse was beating fast beneath my jaw, my blouse was sticking to my chest. Miriam Calder, who knew all and saw all, could surely hear my internal rapture. The Knight of Cups! Here comes my Knight of Cups! She stood over us at the table, steaming mug in hand.

‘Well, Mr Crane usually prefers to hire women, as is clear to see.’ She twisted her neck to assess our stickering system, pass her unspoken judgement. ‘He knows that women will be far more… what’s the word… ?’

‘Malleable,’ said Ruth bleakly.

‘Reliable,’ corrected Miriam.

Ruth looked up at her, with the silent instruction that she could piss off now, but the woman had more tattle to be free of.

‘He arrived with just a single bag, according to Saul Cooper. Just one rucksack – and not a very big one either. What do you make of that?’

‘That he’s a light packer?’ Ruth deadpanned. ‘That he owns a flexible capsule wardrobe?’

‘How old is he?’ I blurted out.

Miriam grinned, validated. ‘Young,’ she replied, ‘and pretty nifty with a Bunsen burner.’

Ruth sighed at my betrayal of our tacit agreement never to encourage Miriam and her chatter.

‘Young?’ I went on. ‘Young, like… ?’

‘Youngish,’ Miriam clarified. ‘Thirty.’

I stared at the folder in my hands, at a loss as to whether it should be labelled green or yellow. A domino run was toppling at speed across my mind: the Knight of Cups has arrived, and now I will fall in love, and now I will know what it feels like, and then I will be married, and then I will conceive at the cottage, and then we will fill a property on the south elevation with children, and…

‘Green,’ Ruth barked. ‘Maths handouts we’re labelling green.’

I pressed a large circular sticker onto the folder, let the action calm me. There was a system to everything, a right order.

‘Oh, you won’t be wanting to get mixed up with him, Miss Cedars,’ Miriam said, turning away, gearing up for one of her enigmatic exits, while I flushed hot, so transparent in my desires. ‘Just one rucksack,’ she repeated ominously. ‘He’s running away from something. You mark my words.’