The Gift of Stones

21

PERHAPS NOW IS the time to make myself quite clearly known to you. It will not do if I stand darkly by to cough and comment at my father’s tale. It is my story, too, and I should show my face. You know me as my father’s daughter and his only child. All that is false. His title ‘father’ was well earned, though not by right of blood. We are not kin.

I am the girl of Doe.

I am the child that he first touched when mother said, ‘Please help.’ She left him standing there, in charge of chicken, dog and child, his gift of samphire fallen at his feet, while she walked off to greet the horseman on the heath. I was the child he rocked to sleep or fed with bean paste and with fish, the one with whom he practised early words like drink and dog and bird. It was for my amusement that he perfected his repertoire of faces and new sounds. I was the first in his adult, one-armed life to barter love with love. So father he became. So father he remains for me.

It was on my father’s arm, with my mother, Doe, exhausted by the slaughter of the geese and the walk along the coast, trailing in our wake, that I first came upon the villagers of stone. My age was not yet two, yet I maintain that I recall that day. We were walking with our backs against the wind and sea. The path was springy, bracken. It led up from the crusty boulders of the shore to the windy brow where Leaf had built his huts. His walls were thick and packed with moss. There was no sign of life — except that, tapping in the wind, there was the rhythmic beat of antler tine on flint, the squeak of bellows, the hum of people hard at work.

Once we had walked beyond the brow and the wind had dropped we heard those beats and taps, those hums and squeaks, in jostling profusion. They sounded like the first and heavy drops of summer rain or like a thousand nutbirds pecking at a shell. The further that we walked into the village, the heavier the rain of pecks, the quieter the sea and wind, the more uniform and tended the walls and pathways that we passed. It must have seemed, to one so young and sensuous as me, that we had sunk into a dream where all disorder had been vanquished by invisible and systematic hands. Compared to what we’d left behind, the turmoil and the passion of the heath, here was a world of symmetry and of composure.

Quite soon we heard the sound of voices. The merchants were at work. We came on to the market green and there — amongst the produce and the crowd — my father saw his uncle trading stone. Now my recollections become enmeshed in father’s version of that day. How many times since then I’ve watched him mime his uncle’s face, its irritation and dismay, its comic fear of our fatigue and what it meant, as we approached his trading stall. We looked to him for heat and food and sleep. He looked at us as if we were weevils in his bread. He had no choice — in front of all his neighbours and the purchasers of stone — but to welcome father and his family home.