The Visitor (40 page)

Her chest was tight and everything was growing lighter. The sea had the polished sheen of the Tregurtha Hotel's best tea trays. A gleaming mist spread between the clouds, filling the sky a good, clean white. Even her skin was brightening as she looked at her hands. Soon she would be as pale and smooth as bone.

She was at the water's edge. A little way out she could see a foaming purple patch. She peeled off her clothes and stood before the sea. An offering. A request. The wind ran its fingers across her.

She waded in and the currents parted, admitting her. When the water passed her knees, Pearl pushed off. The shoal woman was waiting, buoying up a precious cargo; a white shape bobbed in her cloud. She beckoned with her many tails then disappeared as a wave covered Pearl. The currents took Pearl then, lines of cooler water hooking her knees so that she was pulled, legs-first, past the point where the ground disappeared. Her chest contracted and she could breathe underwater. She didn't need air any more. The sea was filling her body, thinning her blood with salt.

She surfaced. The purple cloud was glittering, flickering light. There were no keygrims here, she realised. There was only fear. Fear of drowning, of being washed up, far from home, swollen with seawater and carved bloody by the rocks. That fear had twisted into figures of shell and rank seaweed, made a hand reach out in darkness, made a dead voice call a name. Because worst of all was the fear of not being found, of having a cairn not a headstone. Of a lifetime of loneliness. She had been alone since the riot. Even George hadn't been enough. But she wouldn't be alone anymore, and there would be no more keygrims.

The shoal woman had slipped further away to where the seabed dropped into deeper water. The whiteness was everywhere. Pearl's eyes were full of the white sail, his shirt, the white of the waves breaking. She would stay in the white light now, in the hot pain that was spreading from her temples down her cheeks, across her mouth, making her stiff as a salted fish. He was here in the white, asking her to come with him. He was leaving but she was here. Pearl had found him. They would go together.

She was too far from the shore. She couldn't go back. There was nothing left on land. She closed her eyes and felt a hand take hers; a hand of water, not shell. His hand, the sea in his hand. He wrapped his cold arms round her, holding her close. He showed her how to sink, how to give in, finally. He kissed her and the white light turned to pressing darkness, pulling her down and down. He was the sea and he was the darkness and he was filling her veins. He was with her and she knew then that it was this she had been waiting for.

Acknowledgements

The Visitor
was written as part of my PhD in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. Thanks are due to my supervisor and friend Jem Poster, and staff in the Department of English and Creative Writing. I am very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a Doctoral Award which supported my PhD.

Thanks to my editors – Kathryn Gray who saw something in the novel in the first place and who helped shape it with a wise touch, and Caroline Oakley who was meticulous and sensitive. Thank you to everyone at Parthian.

Thanks to Luigi Bonomi for some early enthusiasm and ideas, and to all who have read the novel and been kind enough to give me their thoughts: Katy Birch, Kate Wright, Kendall Klym and Julia Roberts. Thanks, too, to Charlotte Goatman, who brilliantly organised and managed the research trip to St Ives and Falmouth which kick-started this project, and my sister, Liz Stansfield, who came too and was a fine research assistant and ice cream eater.

Special thanks to Dave, for more than I can ever say.

I am indebted to the work of Cyril Noall, in particular his definitive
Cornish Seines and Seiners: A History of the Pilchard Fishing Industry
(Truro: Bradford Barton, 1972), as well as John Corin's
Fishermen's Conflict: The Story of Newlyn
(Newton Abbot: Tops'l Books, 1988). In addition, the articles in
Cornish
Studies
, published by the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter, have been invaluable in my research, especially the work of Sharron P. Schwartz: ‘In Defence of Customary Rights: Labouring Women's Experience of Industrialization in Cornwall c1750-1870',
Cornish Studies, Second Series, Volume Seven
(ed.) Philip Payton (Institute of Cornish Studies, University of Exeter Press, Exeter: 1999), pp.8-31. Wilkie Collins' wonderful
Rambles Beyond Railways: or, Notes in Cornwall Taken A-Foot
(London: Richard Bentley, 1861) was also very helpful in taking me inside the pilchard palaces.

Pearl's song is Katharine Lee Jenner's poem ‘The Boats of Sennen (Cornish Fisher-Girl's Song)', first published in
Songs of the Stars and the Sea
(1926), and reprinted in
Voices from West Barbary: An Anthology of Anglo-Cornish Poetry 1549-1928
, (ed.) Alan M Kent (London: Francis Boutle, 2000).

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The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council

This ebook version published in 2013

First Published in 2013

The Visitor © Katherine Stansfield

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The right of Katherine Stansfield to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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ISBN 9781-908946812