Gull Island Read Free

penetrate her shocked mind. The revelation was alternately filling her with fear and elation. Now she and Bernard would be married. The fact that she was only seventeen wouldn’t be an obstacle – Mam and Dad had been married at her age, and they’d be glad to have one less person in the cramped rooms.
    She began to feel chilly and came out of her reverie to see that the tide was almost fully in. A sea mist had fallen, hiding the late summer sun so the island was little more than an outline in the opaque air. Apart from the almost unnoticed sound of the waves, everywhere was silent and she fancifully imagined that she was alone in the whole world. She would stay here in the beautiful, hazy, peaceful place, and Bernard would come and find her and they would walk off into the mist and start a new life without having to untangle the confusion that surrounded her.
    But there was no confusion, she reassured herself. All she had to do was wait until Bernard came back from London, explain the situation as Mrs Carey had explained it to her, then leave it to him. They would be married and everything would fit perfectly into place.
    She tightened the jacket round her shoulders, appreciating its warmth. The mist had brought a chill to the air. The island was almost lost to sight now and seemed to be floating on the quietly swelling sea. Bernard called the mist that veiled the scene a sea fret. The beach and the island was, he’d told her, a place of sea frets and mysteries. She smiled. Sometimes Bernard talked as if he were reading poetry. Like when he called her eyes sleeping pools of dreamy wonderment . She wasn’t sure what he meant but it sounded romantic.
    A sound invaded her thoughts and she felt a mild irritation at the intrusion . She recognized the slap of oars on the small waves and the creaking and clunking of wood within rowlocks. Looking out to sea she saw, gradually emerging through the mist, almost as if it were gliding on air, a small rowing boat.
    She began to rise, not wanting to talk to anyone. But the man in the boat had seen her and he called, paused in his rhythmic rowing and waved. She stood, half prepared to walk away but suddenly changing her mind and wanting to talk to someone, and in the eerie light she waved back.
    ‘How could you see your way in this? Daft I call it to go out in a little boat in such weather.’ Unaccountably she was angry for the risks he had taken.
    ‘I’ve only been around to the next bay to visit a friend,’ the young man replied as he dragged the boat up onto the shingle. ‘Here, catch this and tie her to that post, will you?’ As she fumbled with the rope he stepped lightly across the rocks and took it from her. ‘Here, like this.’ Taking the rope, he showed her the way to tie it with a bowline.
    She couldn’t guess the stranger’s age. Perhaps he was younger than herself, perhaps older. She thought he would look the same ten years from now. He was quite small, hardly taller than she was, five feet three at a guess. He was lean, thin even, and his fair hair, bleached almost white by the summer sun, was long and straight, almost touching his shoulders and adding to the illusion of extreme slimness. His eyes, she noticed with fascination , were the colour of the sea and the skin around them was wrinkled as though he spent his days with them half closed against the glare of the sun on the sea.
    He wore a shabby jumper from which threads of wool hung in fringes over his hands and across his neck. His trousers barely reached mid-calf and if there had been hems they had been lost for many months, so, matching the jumper, a fringe escaped the carelessly rolled-up ends like a family of spiders having a free ride.
    The clothes, she thought with a frown, were misleading. The boy, or young man, was no pauper. His voice was without a strong local accent and he sounded what Barbara’s friends would call ‘swanky’. There was an air of confidence about him too that suggested he