The Man Who Mends Hulls

I did not sleep, of course.

A man, southern, no name, said you'd know him. I lay on the borrowed mattress over the chandlery with the lemon cake going stale on the sill and ran the sentence through the only machine I had left, the painter's eye that takes a thing apart by looking at it flat and from slightly above, and I could not make it resolve into a shape I trusted. The "sister" two days ago had been a woman. The voice on the stair the night before that had been a woman. This was a man, and a man asking the gallery, the front of the town, the most public mouth in it, to be the first to shake the painter's hand. That was not how the patient woman with the green antifouling worked. The patient woman left her message and let me make it bigger than itself in the dark. A man who walks into a gallery and gives a face and a manner and no name is a different animal entirely, and I lay there and could not decide whether it was the hunter changing his coat or whether the thing coming for me was, for once since the cliff, simply a thing, and not the thing.

So in the morning I did the only sensible thing a falsely dead woman can do, which is to go and look at it in honest light. June had said the man had asked at the gallery. The gallery had a back wall and a north window and a harbour beyond it, and the harbour, the chandler had told me on my first grey morning, was where the boats were mended. If a stranger wanted a painter, he would have to come where the painter was going to be. I would not wait for the bell. I had spent eight years waiting for the bell, and Nadia's note in its flat capitals said KEEP THE BELL, not cower under it. So I put the green tube I should not have kept into my coat pocket, the way another woman might carry a knife, and I walked down to the water to be sure.

The boatyard sat at the south end of the front where the harbour wall turned and made a pocket of stiller water, and it was nothing like the marina below Aldermoor, the white hulls in rows like teeth, insured for more than the men who washed them. This was a working slip with a tin roof half off it and a smell coming up out of the open shed that stopped me on the cobbles before I had decided to stop, a smell that went straight past eight years and put its hand on the back of my neck. Cut wood. Pine and something darker, oak maybe, and under it the tar and the linseed and a sharp clean note of turpentine that was so exactly the smell of the room I had painted in at twenty-three, the degree-show year, the year before Gideon, that my eyes stung in the cold and I had to stand and let it pass like weather.

There was a man inside the shed with his back to me, working.

He was big in the way that has nothing to announce, a wide quiet back in a jumper gone through at one elbow, and he had a long curl of new wood coming up off the plane in his hands in one unbroken motion, and he did not stop when my shadow fell across the open doorway, did not turn, did not perform the noticing that men in Gideon's world performed when a woman arrived. He finished the stroke. The shaving fell. Then he set the plane down on the bench, square, the way you set a thing down when you are coming back to it, and he turned, and the grey honest light off the harbour came in and found his face, and I had a moment of pure animal stillness in which I tried, as I now tried with every stranger, to fit it into the coat of the thing that wanted to kill me, and it would not go.

He was perhaps forty, weathered, with the kind of face that has had a great sorrow ironed flat into patience. He looked at me the way June had looked at my hands, reading, but he read slower, and what he read did not seem to frighten or excite him. He looked at me as if I were a hull he had not been asked to judge, only to understand.

"You'll be the painter," he said.

His voice was low and unhurried and entirely of this coast, the flat northern nothing I had been practising as a costume and he wore as a skin, and the relief that went through me was so total I had to put a hand on the doorframe, because whatever else he was, he was not southern, and the man June meant had been southern, "Said you'd know him," and I did not know this man, I had never in my life seen this man, and for one clean breath the world was just a boatyard and a smell from before my marriage and a stranger who built things instead of buying them.

"June sent you down," he said. It was not a question and it was not quite right, and I did not correct it. "She does that. Sends people to the water when she wants them softened up." A thing happened at the corner of his mouth that was not a smile but was its cousin. "I'm Callum Ness. I mend hulls. The odd bit of furniture in the winter when the boats are out." He looked at the green tube I had taken out of my pocket without noticing I had done it, and was holding like something I meant to use. "You came down to paint the water."

"I came down to see who'd been asking for me," I said, because I had decided on the stair that morning that I would stop letting the lie do my talking when the truth was safer, and because something in the wood smell had made me incautious. "A man came by June's, she said. Yesterday. Wouldn't leave a name."

The cousin of the smile went out of his face, slowly, the way the light goes off the water before the weather turns.

"That wasn't me," he said. "I don't ask June for things. I'd have come and stood in your doorway myself, like I'm doing now." He wiped his hands on the rag at his belt, taking his time, and I understood that the taking of time was not a man being slow but a man being careful with a thing he could see had a grain to it, and that the thing was me. "But I know the one you mean. He was down here too. Yesterday, after the gallery." He nodded at the slip, at the patched hulls up on their stands, the scarred and mended and loved things that were the opposite of everything Gideon owned. "Stood about an hour. Didn't want a boat. Didn't want mending. Asked the lads who the new woman over the chandlery was, and whether she had family, and whether anyone had come up from the south to see her settled in." He looked at me, and his weathered patient face had gone very still, and it was not June's stillness, the stillness of a person hearing the inside of their own head said aloud. It was the stillness of a man who has decided to tell you a hard thing kindly because there is no kind way to tell it.

"And then," Callum Ness said, "he asked Eddie when the next spring tide was over the bar. The deep water past the end of the wall." He paused. "Same as your bit of coast down south, I'd guess. The kind that doesn't give a body back."

The green tube was very cold in my hand, and the cold went up my arm and into the old place behind my ribs where I kept the verge in the dark and the headlights that had stopped at the exact yard I went over. He had come north. Whoever he was, the patient one, he had not sent a message this time and let me build it bigger in the dark. He had walked the front of my new town in a good coat asking the one question that was not about me at all but about the water, where it was deep, when it would be deep, which is the only question you ask when you have already decided the answer is a body the sea keeps.

"What did he look like," I said, and my practised northern flatness did not hold, and Callum heard it go, I watched him hear it, and he did not ask why a woman down to paint the water should lose her voice over a stranger and a tide table.

"Ordinary," he said. "Good coat. Older. Patient. The kind that doesn't hurry, because." He stopped, the way I had learned to stop, the way Gideon had stopped at the window before because I made sure of that, leaving the worst word in the air rather than saying it, as all careful people do. He looked down at my hand, at the crusted cap and the half-gone label and the cold sap green I had carried out of one staged death and two hundred miles north and could not put down, and then he looked back up at my face, and there was no question in it, only the terrible gentleness of a widower who knew grief that had no villain and was looking, for the first time in a long while, at a grief that plainly did.

"You went white when I said the tide," Callum Ness said quietly. "You want to tell me who you're hiding from, or you want me to pretend I didn't see you do that?"