She lies inside the warm belly of the dune and looks out over the furred complex of sandhills, at the sea. The sun, in, out, of the swift clouds is on her back. She closes her eyes, allowing herself the pleasure of it. The sea presses against the island. Waves crash and suck at the shingle beach below the dunes. The warmth, the rhythm of the water, lull her – but she returns her eyes sharply to the sea, scanning the bare horizon, willing herself to remain vigilant.
The following day is colder. A wind is through the dunes. At the crest of the sand slope tiny white flowers quiver in the marram grass. A bank of raincloud a few miles out is moving over the sea, advancing on the island. For an instant she thinks that she sees something. A dark speck. She keeps her eyes focused for a long time on the same patch of water, but it does not appear again.
There is a low rumbling behind her. She moves to the other side of the dune and lowers herself by the earthy spyhole at the top, from which vantage point she can see the top of the quarry and the roofs of the scattered colony of cottages that is growing up beside it. She waits, her forearms pulsing against the sand. There are voices. The whinny of a horse. She creeps closer to the spyhole, watching the opening a short distance away where the wagonway on its raised embankment emerges from the sand hills.
The usual two men appear, at the head of a convoy: behind follow a grey horse, harnessed to a dumpy wheeled tub rolling along the tracks of the wagonway; a boy; a second, larger, chestnut horse; another tub, then two more men at the rear. As their course curves closer to her she can see the heaped chalky stone inside the first tub and the faint white smoke above it when the tub judders over the track joints. She tries to listen to the conversation of the front men, but she can pick out only the odd word. Rain. Castle. They are Scottish, she thinks. Their boots, clothing, faces are smeared white. The hooves of the horses too are whitened, and as they pass directly beneath her she notices the white prints on their stomachs, which she knows, as she observes the boy moving between the animals, patting, stroking, are his. Every few steps the boy turns to glance at the men behind. When the one she presumes to be the foreman, because his clothes are not stained, quickens his pace to join the men at the front, the boy slips from his pocket a halved apple and feeds it to the grey horse. Then, without taking his eyes off the foreman, he drops back and repeats the action for the chestnut.
The procession travels past her, towards the south shore and the kilns below the castle. It begins, lightly, to rain. Before she has pulled her shawl fully over her head it is a downpour. Craters plug the sand around her face. She scrambles to her knees, watching the men rush for the saddlebags strapped to each horse, to take out covers that they pull over the tubs of limestone. She waits until they are a good distance ahead before she gets to her feet, runs out from the dune, jumps the tracks and is away over the brown exposed farmland across the island for home.
The fire is going in the kitchen. Her mother crouches beside it, pressing a spoon against the dry salted cod that is roasting in a pan on the hearth girdle. She has changed into dry clothes but her hair is still wet, clung to the rain-raw skin of her neck.
‘Will you see on the butts, Elfrida?’
The girl gets up from the table, where she is binding lats for a crab pot, and goes out the back. Rain pours from the roof down a channel into the water butt. It is almost full; she shunts it aside and slides into its place a second, empty, butt. When she is back inside she sits again at the table to continue working at the crab pot, watching her mother by the hearth.
‘They are come in their numbers, the limers,’ the girl says.
Her mother does not look around from the fire. They fall again to silence. There is only the sound of the rain, the minute crackle of fish skin.
‘More cottages is gone up. I seen them from the dunes up by the Head.’
Her mother stands up. She goes to the corner of the room and bends to inspect the weather glass. The level in the jar has dropped, the water drawn up into the small upturned bottle that floats inside.
‘They have you interested.’
‘They are getten a lot, is all,’ the girl says, but she lowers her face so that it does not show in the light of the candle that she is working from. Her mother comes to join her at the table. She takes up two lats and begins, quickly, skilfully, to bind them. There is a rash on the back of one hand, another on the exposed part of her chest, and Elfrida knows that she has been at the harbour all day, sitting in front of the herring houses, viewing the passage onto the sea.
They complete the base of the pot, eat, clear away, and her mother goes up the stair. She goes out to check on the butt and finds that the rain, which has been easing with the approach of evening, has stopped.
She leaves the cottage and walks through the village to the path up onto the Heugh. When she is at the top she lays a blanket over a large stone, a few steps from the cliff edge, and sits down. From here, even in the ebbing light of the sun she can see for miles around. To the west the wet amber gleam of the mudflats stretches away to the mainland. Below her – a sheer rock fall to the shingle beach and the harbour, on the other side of which the Needles tower above Black Law. Hope surges inside her chest at the sight of them; the urgent belief that they must be visible still from the sea.
She looks out at the open water. A wind that she can see but not feel batters the Farnes, foams over the concealed ridges of rock that lie just below the surface. Last summer, there had been storm after storm. The herring shoal, as it migrated down the coast, had been unpredictable and the island cobles, her father’s amongst them, had drifted farther and farther out to sea in search of it. They had provisioned for three nights. By the sixth night her mother ceased her vigil by the harbour. After eight nights her father returned, with the other survivors: the sixty-three men out of ninety who had set out.
A shifting breeze brings the smell of smoke from the village, snugged into the corner of the island behind her. The weather has been kinder this summer, she reminds herself. The men have set out better provisioned – her father with seven days of squeezed corned beef and onion sandwiches, water, tea. She recites her usual blessing, pulls her shawl tight to her chest against the strengthening wind. By tomorrow the excursion will have entered its second week. She trains her sight on the black throat of the harbour passage onto the sea. An awareness of duty, and her mother, holds it there, or tries to – but her eye is drawn back to the land at the side of the passage where the castle, massed against the darkening sky, rises above the six glowing orange rims of the lime kilns. Since they were lit the previous week they have burned all day and all night, and before long they are the only thing remaining in the gloom, except for the intermittent flare of the lighthouse on Outer Farne.
She watches the convoy roll out of the sand hills and she shrinks back as they pass below her. Once they have gone ahead she is pulled by guilt to squint a final time at the sea, before she comes out of the dune.
There are no hills or long grass so she follows stealthily on the shingle alongside the wagonway, wind and spray lashing her cheek until she is close to the south shore. Through the gap between two large boulders she can see a great deal of activity beneath the castle. Men are coming in and out of the access tunnels at the base of the kilns. A schooner is moored at the staithes by the foreshore – a pulley-wheel in its rigging winching down a basket of coal to where three men stand on the rocks ready to reach and guide it. She looks for the quarrymen, and spots them stationed by the track up to the kiln tops. She watches the boy, stroking the chestnut horse’s neck, until the foreman appears from an access tunnel, at the head of a small group. There is some calling out which she cannot understand, and her gut hollows at the sudden thought of her father – his opinion of these migrants; these landsmen.
Ropes are tied to one of the tubs. Some of the men move to the front of the tub and take up the ropes, wrapping them around their waists; others form a ruck behind the tub, bracing their hands against it. At the foreman’s command they begin to heave it up the slope to the kiln tops – and it does move, slowly, but some of the men start to slip in the mud, losing their footing sliding with the tub back to the bottom.
The foreman claps his hands and two men move towards the horses. The boy shakes his head. He stands between the horses, gripping their reins. The foreman says something to him and points to the tracks up the slope. Again the boy shakes his head. More men advance and there is a short struggle as the boy is restrained while the chestnut horse is tethered to two ropes.
The new combination of horse and men ascends steadily. When they near the top the boy breaks from where he is detained and runs to the slope. ‘’Tis over hot for her,’ he shouts – he is Scottish, she comprehends, pressing her forehead to the stone gap. There is a commotion, but the boy indicates with his hands that he does not intend to stop the operation. He runs easily up the muddy slope and positions himself by the horse’s head, talking into its ear, cupping a hand over its eyes.
As the horse reaches the level ground at the top she notices the heat haze above the pots, the air rising and glistening over the castle ramparts. The horse starts stamping, arching its neck. The boy unties it from the ropes while the men, shielding their faces with their hands, turn around and put their backs against the tub to drive it towards the lip of the first pot. It tilts, tips, and limestone cascades down the chamber. There is a dull crash, sparks jumping above the pot, but her eyes move to the horse, and the boy, his mouth against the animal’s neck, soothing, stroking, guiding it gently back from the pot.
She is woken early by the sound of feet outside. Voices. There is a loud knocking at their door. A moment later there is another at the next door, then the next, repeating, echoing down the street. She gets out of bed and goes into the kitchen where she finds her mother, dressed, pulling on her boots. Her face is bright, desperate.
‘They are home, Elfrida.’
Other people are hurrying down the street: wives, mothers, sisters, sleep-dazed children. An old man is coming out of a doorway, through which the embers of a fire breath slowly in the dark. She stays in step with her mother, who is almost running now: she is making a noise, a thin repeated moan, that shocks Elfrida, embarrasses her. Her mother, though, seems oblivious to her presence – her eyes are set on the pink horizon of sea and then the harbour that is coming into view as they hurry with the others down towards it.
The tops of coble sails show above the barnacled roofs of the herring houses. Blood is thundering at her temples. She counts the sails – realising, before they reach the back of the throng of women, that they are not all there. Half, at most. She scours the sheds along the harbour where men are hauling in carts and shattered remnants of wood but she cannot see her father so she looks to the cobles, bobbing and broken on the water, and cannot find his own. Some of the women are crying. Two have their arms around their men, sobbing into their chests. Another woman is on her knees, trembling, alone. Elfrida wants to take her mother’s hand, but her mother’s hands are bunched into tight red corals of knuckle and she knows that she cannot go to her.
A fisherman, a friend of her father, is at the water’s edge, addressing the crowd. Behind him, half a dozen men stand motionless, looking down at their boots submerged underneath the green skin of water.
‘No shelter, nothing,’ the man is saying, ‘and thereckly the entire sea is boiling and we cannot see an arm’s length.’ The men in the water remain silent as he relates the story and it occurs to her that they have rehearsed this; they have agreed on these words to say to the stricken congregation of women.
‘We are pulling buckets, and all we are thinking is to get left the storm but when it is passed we are someway a clean distance off where we were, and it is only us, these cobles that you see here.’
‘Did you not go back?’ one woman shouts.
‘Ay, of course. But nothing. Nothing.’
He lowers his face, shaking his head. ‘I couldna tell you. I don’t know.’
Her mother begins to walk away. Elfrida turns instinctively to go with her; but there is nothing that she can say. She does not move. She watches her mother’s even progress away from the harbour. Through the clouds a weak blanket of light is thrown upon the crumbled remains of the priory as she passes below it, onto the village lane, out of sight.
All afternoon her mother has kept to her room. She came out for the short silent meal that they have recently finished and now she is in there again. Elfrida watches the passage by Castle Point merge into the rocks and the black sea beyond. Two seals playing in the harbour are perceptible now only from the occasional oiled flash of fur as they jump and slip about each other. She urges herself to feel more of her mother’s pain, but it will not come – she feels instead a blank, a blackness; and the constant sidling desire to turn her sight to the six molten rings.
Three figures are walking up the shore below her. She steps to the edge. When they are almost level they look up, all three, to where she stands. She is afraid, exhilarated, but she stays rooted to her position. They look away, then continue down the shingle until they are beyond the rocks at the corner of the island. She waits, her shoulders stiff with cold, until the black spots of their heads come into view again on the other side of the rocks, walking on and gradually receding into the dark sheet of the mudflats. An uprising of seabirds launches, some way ahead, at their approach. A moment later she listens to the passing thunder of wings, follows and loses the flock in the night sky.
The curing begins the following morning. Elfrida and her mother make the walk down to the harbour in long boots, oilskin jackets and shawls wrapped across their chests. The same gathering of women is outside the herring houses, hair pinned above pale faces, waiting by the silver blaze of fish that is piled inside a line of carts, already stinking in the sun.
Mrs Allan, who used to teach Elfrida in the school, arranges them into threesomes. She comes up to Elfrida and her mother and signals for another woman, May, whose man is returned, to join them. As she calls the names Mrs Allan places her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Elfrida sees the fingers squeeze; sees her mother clasp Mrs Allan’s elbow in return, and she is hurt by this fleeting gesture, left out, a child.
They file through the doorways of the two upscuttled boats, into the dark stale workspace. Some of the taller women drag in the carts and pour the herring into the long, brine-filled troughs that cross the length of the room. Elfrida binds May’s then her mother’s hands with strips of flour sack-cloth to protect them from any slip of the gutting knife. She can feel her mother’s breath on her face as she ties the strips fast with thread, running it round and round her sturdy, unflinching hands, stroking secretly over her fingers with each circuit.
The teams take up their formations along the troughs and are immediately to work, with no explanation or preparation, straight into the fast rhythm that will continue into the evening. Elfrida starts pricking on, scraping the scales from the herring and cutting off the heads into a basket. She slides each completed fish to her mother and May, who gut and separate the cleaned fish into a bucket, ready for packing. A sunset of blood deepens over the cloth on her mother’s hands, working beside her own. Blood pools in the trough, drips to the floor. All around them the room is silent but for the sound of scraping and gutting. Sliced necks. The soft patter of piling heads. There is the wet stink of guts. The basket between her feet filling with eyes. Through the bright doorway the men are at work: some folding drift nets and torn sails, for the women; some sitting and tending to the bust hulls of their cobles, which have been lifted and lined up on wooden blocks along the side of the harbour, like casualties.
Elfrida, carefully, regards her mother. She studies the side of her face for any sign of what she is thinking, but there is nothing. She is intent only on her task, the quick skilful dance of the fish and the gutting knife in her hands.
They break, late in the afternoon. Each woman is allotted a single herring, which they take home to fry and eat with bread, onions, a meal that will become as inevitable over the coming days as the thick clag of oil in their hair and the briny cuts on their fingers.
When Elfrida and her mother have eaten, Elfrida, left alone, clears the plates and, with the time that remains before the evening shift, goes up to the Heugh. The air is warm and still. The sun has lowered behind the Needles, and for a tiny moment two brilliant halos flame around them. At the throat of the harbour a porpoise breaks the surface – it goes back under and she traces its course, anticipating where it will come up again.
‘Alright.’
She startles. He stays, unmoving, at the top of the path.
‘Sorry.’ He points to a rock close to her own and walks towards it. She finds that she cannot respond, even to move her head.
He sits down on the rock.
‘A view, that.’
They both look down at the drop.
‘I seen ye, up a height here.’ She does not know if he is looking at her. ‘Ye the harbour pilot eh?’ he says, and she is at once fearful that they have been talking about her, the quarrymen, laughing at her. But when she glimpses across at him he is staring at the cap on his lap, his hands fisting, unfisting inside it. Four miles over the sea the castle at Bamburgh is backlit, then gone.
‘Speak English? Where ye from?’
‘Here.’
‘I’m from Dundee. Working for Nicoll’s, burning the lime. I stay next the quarry.’ He stands abruptly. ‘Ye can see it from here.’ He points, as if it is new to her, as if she does not know by heart every dune and pool and plant of the place.
‘I am away to work,’ she says, getting up.
He does not understand, so she nods in the direction of the herring houses. ‘Curing.’
He continues watching her. She feels herself colouring and wonders if he can tell through the dusk.
‘Good night,’ she says, and begins the descent towards the village.
She can hear her mother’s voice inside the cottage as she nears it, coming back to pick up her oilskin. Assuming that she is praying she waits on the step until she has finished, but there is a succession of ratcheting sobs, words, muttered and broken in between. She moves back from the step and walks alone down to the curing sheds.
When her mother arrives, a short time later, she hands Elfrida her oilskin, without comment, and Elfrida does not look at her face; nor, fearful of what she might detect there, does she let her mother look into hers.
The morning is grey and soft. A fine mizzle dampens their faces as they hasten towards the bustle and laughter that is audible before the edge of the village. On the approach to the sheds they see that a new group of women, a dozen or so, have arrived. They stand apart from the islanders, in yellow aprons, talking. Herring girls, from the mainland. They are looking out at something. Elfrida views with them, surveying the kiln tops, the wagonway, flushing with unexpected relief when it dawns on her that they are looking at the castle.
‘Shake your feathers, you lot, come on now.’ Mrs Allan claps her hands and the crew of silent island women watch the newcomers, all of whom are young, some not much older than Elfrida, go inside the first shed.
A team of three is stationed to one side of her at the trough. She tries, without attracting their attention, or her mother’s, to follow their conversation – rapid, Scottish – about Berwick, the poor state of their dormitories above the curing sheds there; the relief of decent rooms now, above the pubs, where there is not the constant reek of fish. Or men, one of them says, quietly, though Elfrida senses that May and her mother hear it too.
Their work is quicker, more precise, than the island women. From last season she knows that they will have been moving down the coastline since the spring, trailing the migrating shoal, stopping at each of the fishing towns along the way – accumulating money, stories, adventures, moving on. Their four teams finish the first gutting almost simultaneously. They sort their fish into piles of three sizes, then each of the packers climbs with a simple easy motion into their barrel to arrange the first layer. Many of the island women slow or stop to observe. In very short time they have the layer flush and clamber out, pour salt into the barrel, then press it down with the tamp stick – except for one girl, whose team, Elfrida suspects in mockery of the island women, lower her by her ankles into the barrel to tamp down the layer of salt with her hands.
He comes at the same time, as the sun is burning into the back of Bamburgh Castle. He nods in greeting and sits on the same rock. For some time, neither of them speak. When she gives a cautious glance over she sees that he is stroking a thumb over a long red weal on the centre of his palm.
‘Tide is running,’ he says.
She looks at the thickening membrane of water over the flats. An ancient excitement – altered tonight, new – runs through her: the knowledge that the island will soon be cut off, freed, taken by the black swarming sea.
‘Ye ever get left this place?’ he asks.
‘Ay, of course.’
They fall silent again. Her mind turns to Berwick. The tight busy streets. The herring girls, laughing in their dormitories. She wonders if he has seen them; if he knows that they are on the island.
The last time that she was on the mainland was in the winter, with her father. He had been in need of new netting and had borrowed a horse and cart from the Arms’ landlord in agreement that he would pick up the pub’s supplies for the week. She can remember his quiet carefulness with the horse; her own determination not to disappoint him. And, strongly, the same sensation of being adrift that she has known each time she has been away from the island. The strange threatening absence when the noise of the sea is not all around her – even while it echoes still inside her body, soft and insistent as the blood in her veins.
She pictures with sudden clarity his coble, wrecked, wood and boxes and floating sandwiches. A need to be home grips her. She gets up, barely letting herself look at the boy while she mumbles a goodbye and walks away.
The next evening he has something for her. Nestled inside his cap, which he carries with slow reverence up the path and across the cliff top towards her, is an egg.
‘Where d’you get this?’ she asks.
‘Ahint the quarry.’
He smiles. ‘Clam the rocks for it.’
‘It’s a Cuddy Duck. You’ll have to put it back.’
He gapes up at her, baffled, disappointed. ‘This is all I took. There was more.’
‘They are not for taking.’
She is surprised at the force of her own words. They both look at the perfect green shell, spruttled all over with thin white streaks, like a prize gooseberry. She imagines showing it to her mother. Here, look, I have been given an egg. This is what I have been doing, thinking, with my time while you are praying and hoping and grieving alone. Small tufts of down are still clung to the shell. ‘You must put it back,’ she says again, and leaves him there, cradling his cap.
While they work that evening, rain begins to tap on the roof. She is not onto the next fish before it becomes loud enough that they have to shout above it. The herring girls rush to the doorway to look outside at the steaming harbour. Her mother, though, does not look up once from her work, her eyes remaining fixed on the slice and twist and purple slurp of entrails onto the table.
Mrs Allan lets her go early, when she has come to the end of her batch. She goes outside into the rain, but instead of following the path home she starts to walk in the opposite direction, following the edge of the harbour, past a bait pile of shellfish taller than herself, then along the foreshore past the schooner moored at the staithes and – shielding her momentarily from the rain – the castle ramparts, until she comes to the kilns. She pauses, listening to the chemical fizz of water hitting the roasting lime, then continues on to Castle Point.
Through the misted dark she cannot see farther than her fingertips reaching towards the sea. She shivers at the caress of water running down her neck. Her face feels bruised with cold, but she stays there, refusing to yield. Diffused for an instant through the sea fog is the minute brightening of the lighthouse. She lets out a cry, a howl, which immediately disappears.
The rain persists through the night and into the morning. Inside the shed the air hangs with damp. The herring girls are quieter than usual, and Elfrida grows certain that they can sense the anxious mood of the island women. Her body aches. She knows it is likely that she will fall ill. She scrapes and slides and discards the tornbellies, staring into the bucket of eyes, trying to concentrate.
Before lunch the wind picks up and a belt of clear sky moves in from the sea. Excitement speeds through her at the sight of it, which she suppresses, knowing, however she tries to convince herself otherwise, what it is for.
He is there, waiting for her. Straight away he tells her that he has returned the egg: he did it at night during the rain and almost slipped to his death the rocks got that slick. She says that she is pleased. He smiles, studying his feet.
‘Are ye working the morning?’
She shakes her head. It is a Sunday.
‘Will ye meet me?’
‘Where?’
‘Anyplace. Here. Show me the island?’
She tells her mother that she will be gone for the morning, and has planned an explanation that she is taking out over the flats with a small party collecting ragworms for the start of the cod season, but her mother does not ask, so she leaves her in the kitchen, kneeling at the hearth.
He is ready on the Heugh, a cloth sack over his shoulder. Her skin goes cold when he comes towards her, but he stops a few paces away.
‘We’ll be off, then?’ he says.
She steps carefully onto the steep stony path, charged with an awareness of him behind, following her. At the bottom he comes alongside and they walk together onto the beach. To their left the tide is full out and the flats lie bare beneath a thin haze. They skirt around a soft wet heave of seaweed: brown, dark green, seamed here and there with red, then yellow, like a forest at the turn of the season. He does not appear uneasy at their silence, she thinks. They slow to watch a curlew toying with a crab – tossing it into the air then monitoring it scuttle brokenly away before going again in chase of it.
They enter the sandhills. They rise along ridges where marram grass brushes against their legs, then dip into the hollowed shelter of the dunes, which are warm already in the sunlight. He lets her go ahead of him to pass through a narrow gully – and they come upon a pond. A small tree grows at the centre of it, directly from the water.
‘I’ve no been down here before.’
She does not know how to reply, so smiles, but he quickens ahead and she judges that he has recognised where he is – the quarry visible now away to one side.
‘You’ll have the sea thereaway just now,’ she says. And as they come over the lip of the next dune it is there, shimmering and unending before them.
‘We’ll sit down here eh?’ To her surprise he pulls from his sack a rough woollen rug, dusted with white patches. He lays it down on the bank facing the sea and she waits for him to sit down – but he gestures for her to go first so she lowers herself at one side of the rug, and is relieved when he settles down at the other.
‘I’ve pieces,’ he says. She cannot help letting out a small laugh when he takes out two unwrapped sandwiches, uncut, a brown filling seeping from the middle.
She shakes her head. ‘Thank you.’
He takes a large bite from his sandwich, gazing at the sea. ‘That Berwick?’ He points, chewing, to the huddled smudge of town far away on the mainland.
‘It is.’
‘Dundee’s too far to see,’ he says, staring north, intently enough that he is not distracted by the doleful signal of a seal, screaming from the rocky peninsula beyond the beach where an eccentric party of seals and spread-winged shags are enjoying the sun together.
‘Yer family work the herring catch eh?’
‘Depends the season.’
‘Yer da, he a fisherman?’
She turns her face from him. Her throat is constricting. A small noise escapes her and she knows that here, now, she is going to cry. She laughs weakly, as the tears come, because it is happening in front of him. She fights to control herself but he is moving closer to her and as she sees his face, gentle, unembarrassed, she lets herself place her head against his chest. His shirt smells of something animal; horses, she realises.
‘I’d heard tell about the fleet. I’d no thought – just no thought, sorry.’
She stays against him for a moment. When she pulls away he is mindful not to look at her while she wipes her face.
He goes into his sack. ‘Here.’ He produces an earthenware mug, full of blackberries. ‘These is off the bushes by the wagonway.’ He hesitates, then offers the mug, grinning. ‘I’m allowed to take these eh?’
She smiles, picking a couple out. ‘Them that wants them is welcome.’
A sudden rush of noise from behind makes them both start. A dense flock of knots – twenty thousand or more – appears over their heads. He twists, grabbing his sack, and holds it above her. For several breaths the dune is in shadow – and then the flock passes, the sun once more on her face. She watches the dark cloud of birds speeding to sea, a long tendril at the back swirling and thinning, splitting from the main body, then absorbed again into its mass. He stays where he is, close to her. He is stroking the red mark on his palm, and she sees that there are other cuts and scabs on his knuckles.
He notices her looking. ‘Hands is battered. See.’ He holds them out. ‘And see this.’ He pulls up the sleeve of his shirt to reveal a long raw blister up the inside of his forearm. It is recent. Damp. ‘Burned it. All that rain. Makes the quicklime terrible jumpy.’
She puts out her own hands. ‘I’ve keens too. Bealings on all the finger ends.’ She shows him the swellings where brine and salt has got into the tiny cuts from the scaling knife. He takes one of her hands, carefully cupping it in his own, to inspect more closely.
‘Working hand, that.’
He trails a finger lightly over her cuts. She closes her eyes – but opens them again at the thought of her mother. She gets to her feet, saying quietly that she is needed. He gives a small nod before she scales the dune side. Only when she is at the top and turns round to take him in does she see the people on the beach below, coming down from the quarry cottages, some pointing, waving, to sea – where a distant scattering of cobles, nine, ten, not enough, is sailing towards the island.