Jim Crace: The Gift of Stones

“Are they done?” she said. She was standing at the fireside, her smock in place, the dog sniffing at her hands.

“Not yet.”

“You’re not much use.” She shook the clay pot with a stick and the slott came up like bubbles in a pool. She tipped the pot and let the water run away until there were only dumplings and a little juice. She reached for some dry wood which was stacked inside the hut and for a while we had a golden flame without much smoke by which to eat our meal. She looked much older in that light. Sockets large and rimmed from sleeplessness, lips cracked and ulcerated, hair coarse and bunched in stooks behind her ears, white sores in clusters on her nose. I’d seen her skin before. It had the points and peaks of urchin shells. I’ve said her eyes were good. Quite clear and grey and unabashed. She handed me hot dumplings.

“They’re good,” she said, but she did not eat with appetite. She ate as if it were a duty. She had good cause. The taste was high and tedious.

“We had much better food,” she said, “when my husband was around. We had our pick. Crab, we had. And laver soup. And samphire, too. That tastes so good. He picked it at low tide in summer from the marshes over there.” She hardly moved her head. “You have to let the roots hang for a while before you cook. And then you strip it with your teeth. You eat the flesh and throw the stem into the fire. It whines and bubbles there like spit. We had all sorts of fish. He caught them in those baskets.” Again she hardly moved her head to indicate the fish traps, holed and ageing, hanging from the roof. Her voice woke up the baby. It was a girl. She crawled onto her mother’s lap but would not take the salty pellets of slott which her mother offered on a finger. She lived in the hope of milk and nuzzled at the smock until her mother pushed it from her shoulders to her waist and let her suck. Her breasts were scarcely more than nipples. ‘There is no milk,’ she said, and shrugged. She must have known that I was watching her, a youth who’d never seen a woman naked and so close.

I see you smile and brighten up as if you think I’ll tell some tale of how I dropped my head, perhaps, and took the woman’s other nipple in my mouth. Or, throwing down my dumpling, put my one good hand upon her knee. Hard luck. You have ignored the state that she was in, the ulcers and the dirt, her thinness and her poverty. What I said about her eyes — quite clear, and grey, and unabashed — has made you think of sex. Me, too. She was a beauty in decay. And I was cold and wet and far from home and frightened of the night.

She was obsessed with food. She went on talking with the baby tugging drily at her breast: “When my husband was still here we’d eat so well. Lobsters, coalfish, ebb meat. We never ate the same thing twice. Baked eel. Baked guillemot. Seakale. Goose eggs. Have you had those? Have you had mussels roasted in hot stones?” She told how her husband and her two boys would scour the sea shore for its fruits, how they would search the cliffs for nests, and harvest reeds, and club the seals to death. Once they found a whale, a rorqual, on the beach. There was meat and hide enough to feed and clothe a hundred men. And fat for light, and bones for fuel, and ribs for making huts. They took the surplus — the whale, the eggs, the kale, the tasty saltland rabbits — to the markets at the villages around, and they came back with meat and milk and cheese and beans and beer.

“On market days we had a feast,” she said. And then, one day when they had gone to trade at the village where the stoneys lived, they did not return. The dog came back. But not her husband or the boys. She waited. She was waiting still. Who knows what happened to them? She went herself to the village. “I’ve never seen such things,” she said. “Such wealth. Such homes. But the people there…” She mimed some spit. “They had no time for me. I came back here. I had this child, poor thing. I do the best I can. I have the dog. I do a little trade. But I never caught a fish. No one taught me how. I never clubbed a seal. I couldn’t climb a cliff for eggs. So I make do. I found a dead fish on the shore today, its eggs were swollen in its pouch. This slott has been a treat. And then? Perhaps my family will come back and we’ll eat well again before we die.”

I asked her, had she seen a ship. She shook her head. She hadn’t seen a ship. All she’d seen that day was me, emerging through the heathgrass with a look of terror on my face. I’d looked so frightened of her dog and so burdened with the rain that she had no choice but to offer help.

“And that?” she asked. She nodded at my severed arm. “What happened to the rest?”

What happened to your husband and your sons? I thought. The same, no doubt. If I could lose an arm for a dozen scallops, then they could lose their lives for whale meat, rabbits, kale.

“My arm?” I said. “I lost it at my birth. You know what mothers are. Mine couldn’t wait and pulled me out, and snap. It came away. You don’t like that? Then, let it be an animal that tore it free. Half dog, half gull. No one knows its name. One bite.”

Why tell the truth when lies are more amusing, when lies can make the listener shake her head and laugh — and cough — and roll her eyes? People are like stones. You strike them right, they open up like shells.’

‘WE ALL SLEPT well enough. The dog was reassuring and the baby far too weak and underfed to do much else but suck and doze. I spent the morning on the marshes by the shore. There was no hurry to get home — by ‘home’ (so far) I mean the village, not the smoky hut. And there was samphire in abundance, a little past its best, but a favourite of the woman and a gift from me.

When I returned there was a single horseman waiting in the grass beyond the hut. The woman with her baby and the dog was talking to him. He gave her something which hung still and then began to flap. A chicken, upside down and twined up at its feet. She walked towards me and my gift of samphire. “Please help,” she said. She handed me the chicken and the child and made me hold the dog back by its neck. “It won’t take long,” she said.

I stood and watched and she rejoined the horseman. He dismounted and they walked into the longer grass. I watched her as she took her belted smock by the hem and pulled it high and off above her head. She stood there, thin and naked once again, the horseman’s hands upon her waist. With her good eyes she turned and watched me watching her. “Go inside,” she called. “Can’t you kill a chicken?” I did not move. They lay down on the earth. This time it was the horseman who pulled a screen of grass to block my view’.

‘YOU SEE? I’ve pulled a screen of grass across the story, too. I’ll not creep up and tell you what I saw. I’ll spare myself — and her. Now you know, you can be sure, that this is truth — no chronicler with any sense would disappoint his listeners so. The narrative would buzz and hover like a gnat above the horseman and his whore. We’d watch his buttocks, double-dumplings, and her knees. We’d follow their duet. Instead, you’ll hear from me a solo of lament. I felt — in charge of dog and child and hen — as if she’d let me down. Betrayed.

I’ll beat it out as simply as I can. That night just past had been the calmest in my life. I’d found an audience at last. We’d dined on slott beside the romance of a fire. Her dozing baby and her breasts, the dismal meanness of her hut, the dog, the wind, and (more than that) the age of her which made her sweetheart-mother-sister interlaced, a braid, had filled my head with countless expectations. She hadn’t cared about my arm. Or knapping flints. Or stone. She’d said, Do this. Do that. Make sure that pot is safe. Here, take the child. And hold the dog. Can’t you kill a chicken? Could you walk down — take this bag — and pull some samphire roots? Before, I’d only ever idly stared through doors to watch the workers shaping stone, to smell their smells, to watch their lives while waiting for the Scram, Get out, We’ve work to do. And so, you see, the smallest dumpling, cooked with patience, given with a smile, could make a servant out of me, could make me lose my heart.