The Glass Ocean(97)
My mother disliking the duty, as I grow it is I who am sent to the market. There I am a spectacle in all weathers with my mother’s basket on my arm, judging, along with the housewives of Whitby, the spoiltness of mutton, the freshness of oysters, the relative percentage of spiderwebs to dough in the bread, whether the butcher’s scale is weighted fairly, whether the potboy charges fairly for the ales. The ocean sighing beneath, shifting its broad, grey back under the sodden, louring tent of sky. Voices hiss behind me:
Poor barne!
Well! She’s a red’un, ain’t she?
Yais, terrible red.
Big for her age.
Verra big.
She don’t favor her mother at all.
No. Nor the father, neither.
Which father, dear?
Hush. Hush now. She’ll hear.
They go quiet as I approach, then resume behind my turned back. There’s a joke that I don’t understand. The word argument is meaningless to me, in the sense that they intend it. What does it matter? I am spectacular here. I am a youthful, ginger giantess, a startling and incongruous figure, possessing the broad back and large feet of my grandfather, Felix Girard; spectacular, in Market Street with my basket, my child’s breath rising on the frosty air as I jostle earnestly in and among the housewives. While my mother remains at home. Tending to other matters. Or none.
It’s quite a misfortune, ain’t it? About the hair an’ all.
Yais. And them feet. On a girl. Pity.
Yais. Such a pity.
• • •
But there are other attentions, too, which contradict the first. Old Leng at the fish stall, who reaches across his display of bulbous, gape-eyed, put-upon herrings, his prawns and smelts and winkles, to grasp with grubby fingers a curling tendril of my hair. Elizabeth Hendley in the dry goods, a kind woman usually but in my presence suddenly uneasy, broad rump shifting nervously behind a counter thick with buttons and spools, needles, handkerchiefs, bits of lace. I have come to buy my mother a spool of thread. Here’s trouble coming. You can see it in them blue eyes, a’right. Give it a year or two. It’s coming sure eno’. Her own eyes small, black, evasive. Then the carriage that one day follows me home in the rain, all the way up Bridge Street, until finally at the gate I turn to look—only then, the driver spurring the horses on, does it rush past, the blurred ghost of movement at a drowning curtained window the sole hint of the interest within. The maids who pluck and pull at me in the market, saying, Aww, it ain’t real, is it? She’s like a doll or sumpin’—I’d like to take her home wi’ me—
From which I come to know about other species of desire than the sort that I, as a child, feel—to bite sharply through the fibrous, exotic caul of an orange so as to receive upon my tongue the tangy, shocking gush of pulp; or to hold in my own hands the warm, frantically pulsing body of the pullet newly beheaded by the butcher’s remorseless blade.
These are my desires.
• • •
Hey, Red. Walk my way, why don’cha?
• • •
From which it may be seen that there are continuities, old world to new.
• • •
Among my admirers it is the boy who is the most persistent. The others leave off, lose interest, after a time. But not him.
• • •
To understand this is to understand that in the absence of my parents’ attention, in the gap that they have created, I am swept out into the streets—into Whitby’s damp, convoluted alleys and passages and tunnels, its secret staircases made of stone, winding down toward the sea. I am in the company of other children who likewise swarm there, some as lost as I am; no, not that, it’s untrue what I have said, in fact very few are lost; most are the subject of someone’s urgent though temporarily distracted attention—I imagine anxious mothers of six, with husbands, lost or not, at sea. Except of course for the boy, he seems as orphaned as I am—I, orphaned by anticipation; he, by fate; this interpreted by both of us as freedom, while being, really, something else, something we’d rather not think about, not yet, at least; no, not yet. We are too young for that, still.