Samantha Harvey - Dear Thief

First thing this morning when I was walking from the Tube to work I caught the smell of marzipan that comes off new gorse. It’s early for gorse, but possible, so I looked around, even detoured up a side street to see if I could find what was giving that scent. There was no gorse and anyway I lost the smell, but when I got back to the original spot I could smell it again.

So, in my mid-morning break I went back to that same place, just to see if I could still smell it, and I couldn’t, and I couldn’t account for why I had even thought I might, or why I had bothered to try. But it was the most curious thing, because as I was about to walk back I saw my bracelet on a low wall at the end of somebody’s front garden — the silver bracelet with the pearl inset. It must have somehow come undone when I was standing there earlier this morning, maybe when I turned my watch round to see if I had time to go and trace where the smell was coming from.

Again, that strange sense I described before, of tuning in through static. You see, the pearl in that bracelet is the one Nicolas found on our last pearl-fishing trip in Scotland, and I always associate this trip with the smell of gorse, because we went in late spring when the valley of the Oykel River was rife with it. We woke up in the morning and unzipped the tent to the smell of marzipan and heather, of water, sky, bracken.

I am writing this in Gene’s room — the man who has recently moved into The Willows. It must be almost nine at night and he is sound asleep. He sleeps a lot, and badly, waking up anxious every hour or so, but we have discovered that if somebody sits by his bed while he goes off to sleep he will probably go for hours, maybe all night, before waking up again. I’m writing by the shaving light, and I have been sitting here quietly in the chair with my eyes closed, listening to his breath. This is what remains of a big, strong man after eight-and-a-half decades on the planet — such a small amount of time relatively speaking, eight-and-a-half decades. Really nothing cosmologically, an eye blink, and yet it completely undoes a strong man.

There was an almighty storm on that last trip to Scotland. It has always felt to me that we ripped the pearl from its jaws, plunged our hands in and pulled it out a minute before the landscape collapsed. We arrived on the Friday night in good weather, pitched our tent by the river in the dark and got up just after sunrise. The sky was a pale, vast blue. Before bed, I had boiled water in the pot over the fire and filled up hot-water bottles, then dug the hot-water bottles into our bag of clothes so we could put them on warm and dry in the morning.

There was nobody and nothing in the valley, and every sound was of water, flowing through things, into things, around things and against things. Teddy probably ran the short distance down to the river beach where Nicolas stood and began shovelling the shingle into piles; he, like his father, loved to dig. I built a fire with the dry wood we had brought. Nicolas waded knee-deep into the river. To fish for river pearls you need shallow, fast-flowing water. You lower a glass-bottomed bucket into the river and scan the gravel bed, and if you find a mussel you use your hands or a cleft stick to pick it out, and you break it open. There will almost never be a pearl inside.

‘There,’ Nicolas said, and I too waded in and squinted onto the riverbed at the cluster of mussels. They were shallow enough to pluck from the gravel where they had been filtering the rushing water for food. In his palm I could see their exposed siphons, liplike and wide open, as if suffering an unbearable thirst.

We took them to Teddy who was standing at the river’s edge ankle-deep, stuffing his small hands between rocks to feel for mussels there, and we helped him prise them apart. ‘Look!’ he said. He ran his finger around the inside of a shell, the thick and silky layer of nacre. I told him about the nacre and how the pearl is made. ‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ I said. ‘The purples and blues.’ I held the dead mussels in my palm while Teddy squatted, nose wrinkled, and peered at them.

Before we discarded the shells I sat with him and counted their rings to see how old the creature was. ‘Like trees,’ I explained. ‘The more rings, the older it is.’ Some must have been sixty or seventy years old, a figure that astounded Teddy into one of his stern, focused silences in which he would stare blankly and meanwhile prod at something with his thumb — the ground, his thigh, in this case the hollow of the shell. He would prod almost painfully. Then reanimate and leave the thought behind, whatever it had been.

We fished from daybreak until mid-afternoon. Often in the Highlands the very early mornings are clear and blue and then become gradually duller as if, I always thought, our human presence clouded the landscape like breath clouds glass. So by mid-morning the clouds were grouping around the mountains. The duller light made the mussels more visible — the water’s surface no longer glittered and reflected or threw down phantom shapes to the gravel bed. Nicolas handed them to me in fistfuls and I took them to Teddy on the shore where we sorted through them. Teddy would peer deep into the open shell. ‘Nope,’ he would say. And, ‘Nope again’, with a sceptical sigh that was adult and borrowed and, I knew with some embarrassment, was my own.

Nicolas could spend hours in the water without rest, and he did that day. Though he had always found pearls when he fished for them on his own, on our three or four pearl-fishing trips together we had never found one. It was a matter of pride to him to find one this time, and proof of purpose: I don’t assume this, I know it. He tells me that it is common amongst boys who have grown up without a father, in an environment of mother and sister and mother’s friends and sister’s friends and conversations that considered in depth the precise nature of men’s shortcomings, for the boy to be almost pathological about pleasing women, as though he might, and must, single-handedly right all male wrongs. In the cool, head-shaking statement, Typical men , which he heard so often after so many a story of maltreatment, selfishness and recklessness, the boy grew up wishing to be anything but a typical man. So he divests hours in the cold task of finding this proverbial needle in a haystack, turning himself inside out to find a pearl in this river for his wife.

You might not recognise this picture of a labouring, tireless man, because at home he was looser and lazier, whereas when he was pearl-fishing or mudlarking he interrogated the earth, he was almost merciless. There were no breaks in duty; I took tea out to him midstream and he drank it only because he had nowhere to put the mug down. For lunch he ate a bacon sandwich out of the same necessity. Otherwise he submerged his bucket into the monotone of his own reflection and waded slowly downriver and up. His shoulder bag would fill with mussels and every so often I’d go to him or he’d come to me to empty it, and we’d replace it with an empty bag.

One of the strongest memories I have of this day is of a moment that came just before we found the pearl. Teddy and I were breaking shells open on the shore. I looked up and for once Nicolas wasn’t leaning into the river, but was standing upright in the water with one of his feet in the bucket to stop it being taken by the current, and he was staring at us. He has a tendency to make the softest and saddest of faces when thoughtful, which I have never been able to interpret. Maybe they are real moments of sadness but, if they are, they come from somewhere else, and not from the moment at hand. And sometimes I am inclined to think I misread the expression altogether and what seemed sad is just pensive, or not even that. Just the way the flesh falls. Do you know the face I mean? Did you ever have a way of interpreting it? That was the way he looked at us then.