“You don’t happen to know the steps?” she asked him.
Fabio looked doubtful. “I watched my mother when she danced in the cabaret.”
“Good,” said Aunt Coral. “I’ve always wanted a partner.”
Fabio was not at all sure that he wanted to dance the tango with a very large aunt who had stuffed him in a tin trunk and kidnapped him. But he was too polite to refuse and he had noticed the night before that the moon was far from full so that he could only hope she would forget.
Then in the afternoon things got strange again because Aunt Myrtle took them down to the point to meet the seals.
They lay about by the edge of the water, the cows dozing while they waited for their pups to be born, the bulls jostling each other and shoving to test their strength.
But one seal was sitting quite alone on a rock. He had turned his back on the rough games of the other seals and was staring romantically out to sea. It was the seal who had come close to the shore on the first day; they would have known him anywhere.
“Herbert, I’d like you to meet Fabio and Minette,” said Myrtle, just as if she was introducing someone in a drawing room.
Herbert opened his eyes very wide and looked at them. It was an extraordinary look for a seal; both children stepped back a pace; they felt as though they had been weighed up and examined by a great intelligence.
“He can’t be an ordinary seal,” said Fabio.
Aunt Myrtle looked at him gratefully. “No, dear, you’re absolutely right. Herbert is a seal but he’s a very special kind of seal. He’s a selkie.”
“What’s a selkie?” asked Fabio.
Myrtle sighed. “It’s not easy to explain,” she said, “because it’s all to do with legends and beliefs. There aren’t a lot of facts.”
“Tell us,” begged Minette.
Aunt Myrtle sat down on an outcrop of rock and the children came to sit beside her.
“All sorts of things are told about selkies,” she began. “That they are the souls of drowned men…that they are a kind of faery and if someone sticks a knife in them they will turn back into humans.”
“A knife!” Minette was horrified. “How could anyone do a thing like that?”
Aunt Myrtle shrugged. “I certainly couldn’t.” But she blushed, thinking of how she had sometimes wondered what would happen if she did get up the courage. Would Herbert really turn into a man, and if so, what kind of a man? Might he become a showing-off kind of man like a bullfighter, always trailing his cape about? Or a really boring person who thought about nothing except making money?
Herbert had come to the Island many years ago. His mother had brought him because he had a cough which wouldn’t get better and it had got about that the Island was safe even for seals who were not well. The aunts had healed his cough and then Myrtle had played the cello to him and he had stayed.
They had known of course that he wasn’t an ordinary seal. Herbert did not speak exactly, but he understood human speech and sometimes when he and his mother talked together in the selkie language, which is halfway between human speech and the language of the seals, Myrtle could make out…not the words exactly, but the sense of what they said.
“He had a very famous grandmother,” said Myrtle, dropping her voice. “At least, we think she was his grandmother. She was called the Selkie of Rossay and there are stories told about her all over the islands.”
“Tell us,” begged Minette again. She could never get enough stories.
So Aunt Myrtle pushed her hair out of her eyes and began.
“The Selkie of Rossay was a female seal who lived about a hundred years ago. One night she came out of the sea and shed her sealskin and danced with nothing on by the light of the moon and a fisherman came and fell passionately in love with her.” Myrtle paused and gave a wistful sigh. “You know how it is,” she said, “when people are dancing by the light of the moon.”
The children nodded politely though they didn’t really.
“So he hid her sealskin and brought her some clothes and married her and she stayed with him and had seven children and they were perfectly happy. Though when they sat down, even on dry days and in completely dry clothes, the children left a damp patch. Not…you know…anything to do with nappies. Nothing nasty — it was an absolutely fresh damp patch — but it showed they had seal blood.”
Herbert was listening most intently. He moved closer, he cleared his throat.
“Then one day when she was rummaging in a trunk, the selkie found her old sealskin and she put it on and the sea called to her — it called to her so strongly there was nothing she could do — and she dived back into the sea and after a while she married a seal and had seven seal children. But for the rest of her life she was in a terrible muddle, calling her sea children by the names of her land children and her land children by the names of her sea children and never really knowing where she belonged. At least, that is the story.”
Myrtle stopped and Herbert gave an enormous sigh and rolled over on to his side. He might have forgotten how to speak like a human, but he had understood every word and the story Myrtle told was his own.
The Selkie of Rossay had been his grandmother. She had gone crazy in the end from not knowing whether it was better to be a woman or a seal, and Herbert’s mother, the youngest of her seal children, had stayed with her till she died, seeing that she didn’t starve even when her teeth fell out and her eyes filmed over.
Herbert’s mother was still alive; she came ashore sometimes and nudged her son and tried to get him to make up his mind about what he wanted to be because she knew it didn’t matter whether one was a man or a seal so long as one stuck to it.
But Herbert took after his grandmother. He couldn’t decide. When Myrtle played the cello to him it seemed that being human was the best that he could hope for. But when he watched Art and saw what he would have to do if he was a man — wear trousers with braces or zips, and shoelaces and all that kind of thing — he would dive back into the water and turn over and over in the waves and think: This is my world; it is here that I belong.
When the children got back to the house, they found Art with a large piece of sticking plaster on his forehead. He had tried to give Lambert some lunch and Lambert had torn the plate out of his hand and hurled it across the room. Then he’d lain down on the floor and drummed his heels and screamed for his father and his mobile telephone.
“I’d have thumped him,” said Art now, “but I daren’t. I don’t know my own strength. I might have pulped him into a jelly.”
Fabio didn’t say anything but he was beginning to wonder about Art’s great strength. Meanwhile Lambert was still in the room above the boathouse.
“But he can’t stay there,” said Coral. “The boy is a fiend. We’ve got to get rid of him.”
But though they discussed it for the rest of the day, none of the aunts could see how this could be done short of killing the child — which they would very much have liked to do, but which was not the kind of thing that happened on the Island.
Chapter 5
When the children came down to breakfast the next day they saw at once that the aunts were worried. Etta’s moustache stood out dark against her pale face and her nose had sharpened to something you could have used to cut cheese.
“I really don’t want to operate,” they heard her say, “but it’s serious. She’s completely egg-bound.”