The Main Cages. Philip Marsden
ashore here or you carry on aboard. Up to you.’
Maurice looked up at the hulk of the rock.
Croyden stood by the gunwale. ‘Hurry! We got work to do.’
They reached the grounds in time and the fishing was good. When the Maria V returned to the Main Cages that afternoon, Maurice climbed back on board in silence. In Polmayne he mumbled his thanks to Jack and hurried off along the East Quay without a backwards glance.
On Saturday afternoon, Jack returned home from fishing to find a note pushed under his door:
Beach Supper – Ferryman’s Cottage 7 p.m. – do come!
Maurice and Anna Abraham.
He rowed there. After a day of broken cloud, the sky had cleared and left the bay wrapped in silky evening light. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Jack passed the Maria V, motionless at her mooring. He passed the other working boats and the three rotting schooners in the mud, and the Petrels near Green’s Rock with the sunlight flickering on their glassy sides. Beyond Penpraze’s yard the river curved inland and there were no more boats. Nothing but the boughs of scrub oak brushing the top of the tide. He heard the cry of a curlew and he leaned on the paddles and let the boat drift on in silence. He gazed at the woods and their reflection in the water and felt the last of the sun on his back. Then he caught the faint smell of woodsmoke and the sound of voices. He dipped his paddles again and rowed on around the corner.
As soon as he arrived at Ferryman’s Cottage, Jack wished he had not come. About a dozen people were sitting outside. He let the boat slide in to the beach and he climbed out and hauled it up. One of the men was standing, telling a story in a succession of different voices. ‘In the back was a darkened room and he told them …’
Maurice saw Jack and came over. In a hushed voice he explained who everyone was. The story-teller was the ‘poet and distinguished Communist’ Max Stein. There were several painters from London, St Ives, Lamorna. Jack recognised Preston and Dorothy Connors. There was a sculptress called Peter, a ‘radical’, an ‘anarchist’ and several others. Everyone had an epithet. Everyone was listening to Max Stein: ‘… and he says – there’s only two of us but the woman’s for free!’
Laughter rang out around the creek.
Max spotted Jack. ‘Ah, Maurice – your fisherman!’ He came over and looked Jack up and down. ‘Are you un vrai pecheur?’
‘Hardly …’ muttered Jack.
‘Know how to tell a true fisherman?’ Max turned to the others.
‘You ask him,’ said the woman called Peter.
‘He catches fish,’ said the anarchist.
‘The smell!’ Max made a show of sniffing Jack’s shoulder. ‘Sea-salt … damp … soap …’
Anna Abraham came out of the cottage, wiping her hands on her apron. Her sky-blue scarf was tied peasant-style behind her neck. She said quietly to Jack: ‘Please – I need your help.’ She had a crisp, rounded accent: Icelandic, according to Mrs Moyle, whose late husband had spent five years fishing up there and had come back speaking exactly like Mrs Abraham.
He followed her inside. On the slate floor of the kitchen were four hen crabs. One of them was slowly snapping a paintbrush in its claw. Anna lunged for it but it scuttled away. Jack removed the brush himself. He captured each of the crabs and put them in a large bucket. Anna Abraham boiled water on the range and Jack dropped the crabs in one by one. When the crabs were cooked Jack smashed the claws with a scale-weight. He showed Anna how to open the carapace and extract the good meat with her fingers.
‘What a strange fruit the crab is!’ Her hands were smeared with crab meat. ‘Maurice said he had a very interesting time fishing with you.’
‘He told you about the rock?’
‘What rock?’
Jack told her about Maurice’s day spent on Maenmor.
‘Poor Maurice!’ Anna was still laughing as they took the plates of dressed crab outside.
When Jack rowed back, it was nearly dark. A thin moon had risen over Pendhu and its light glittered and spread across the water. He rowed on into the middle of the bay, filled with an elation that he could not quite explain.
The following afternoon Anna Abraham came to call on Jack. She brought him a bag of cherries. When he opened his door, she made a mock bow. ‘You must accept my thanks, Mr Sweeney – twice.’ And she made another little bow.
‘Twice?’
‘One – for explaining to me the crab. Two – for saving our lives in the storm.’
She was not wearing her headscarf. Without it, she looked different. The hem of a fawn raincoat reached down to the top of her Wellington boots and she said: ‘I am out for a walk. Will you come?’
So they walked along the front eating cherries. The sky was a deep blue and there was little wind. They followed the path to the end of the houses and up out of town. At the top of the hill they caught their breath and looked back over the roofs to Pendhu Point. The dark tops of the Main Cages were just visible beyond it, ruffed with white surf. In one corner of Dalvin’s field were the first of the visitors’ white tents. Anna said, ‘They look like mushrooms.’ At the lifeboat station, she stood on tiptoe to peer in at the boat and was amazed how ugly it was. ‘A bull in a barn!’
There was a small beach below the station. Anna pulled off her boots and paddled in the water. She splashed through the shallows and then they sat on the rocks and she laid her bare feet on the weed and looked at him askance. ‘You have bird’s feet, Mr Sweeney, here beside the eyes. We say that’s a happy sign.’
‘In Iceland?’
‘Iceland?’
‘You are from Iceland, Mrs Abraham?’
She laughed and shook her head. ‘I’m not even sure where Iceland is. I come from Russia!’ And she jumped down from the rocks and ran back to the water.
Two days later Jack rowed up the river to Ferryman’s Cottage. He had brought the Abrahams a turbot. Finding no one there, he wrote a note thanking them for supper. He put it on the table under the fish, then changed his mind: he rolled up the note and jammed it into the fish’s mouth.
One afternoon in late July a red, snub-nosed lorry drew up on the Town Quay and Jack and Croyden stepped away from the wall to meet it. On the side of the lorry was written ‘Hounsells of Bridport’ and in it were twenty brand-new pilchard nets.
Jack remembered Hounsells as a child. He remembered the treacly, creosote smell that came from it; he was told it was a factory for ‘fish-traps’ and always imagined a fish-trap as something like an underwater mousetrap, baited with tiny sacs of treacle.
Helping to unload the nets, fielding as he did so the half-respectful jibes from Parliament Bench about doing a ‘bit ’a shrimpin’’, he picked up pieces of Bridport news from the driver. His farm was now in the hands of a ‘fat Devon man’ who was selling off some of the woods. The driver did not know Jack’s great-aunt Bess but he did know Arthur Sweeney – Jack’s cousin – who had made himself very unpopular by cutting down two famous oak trees. Jack was more pleased than ever to be free of the land.
The