A Small Boat, a Long Night

Nell rowed out at dusk because that was when the pots wanted checking, and because, if she was honest, it was the best hour to be on the water, and she had never seen the sense in pretending otherwise.

The boat was called Patience. It had been called that when she bought it, and she had thought about changing the name and then not got round to it, which she supposed was the point. It was small and wooden and a little heavy in the bow, and it went where she told it, in the end.

The harbour was quiet. The bigger boats were in, tied up along the wall with their fenders creaking. A gull stood on the slip and watched her push off with the expression of a gull. Behind her the row of cottages along the front was going grey in the last of the light, and one or two windows had come on already, yellow and square.

She did not look back at the one she cared about. She knew it would be lit. That was the arrangement.

Out past the harbour mouth the water changed colour. It went from brown to green to a deep grey-blue that had the sky in it, and the sky was doing what it did at that hour, going pink low down and pale above and losing its edges. There was a little wind off the land, enough to put a shiver on the water and a cool hand on the back of her neck. She rowed into it, steady, not fast. The oars went in and came out. The boat talked to itself in the way of old boats.

The pots were off the point, six of them on a line, marked with a buoy that had once been orange. She found it where she had left it, which was always a small relief, and shipped one oar and leaned out and took hold of the rope.

Hauling pots is slow work and wet work, and she liked it. The rope came up cold and heavy with weed. The first pot came up with nothing in it but a crab the size of a saucer, who looked at her with great offence, and she put him back. The second had a lobster. A good one, dark blue, waving its claws about in the general direction of the sky. She banded it and laid it in the box in the bow, and it went on waving, more slowly, at nothing in particular.

The third had weed. The fourth had a lobster and a small fish that had made a poor decision. The fifth was empty. The sixth had a lobster bigger than the first, and she said, “Well, hello,” to it, and it did not answer, and she banded that one too.

Two lobsters and a fish. Not a bad evening. She rebaited the pots and let them go one after another, and watched each one sink out of sight into the green, and the line go taut, and the buoy that had once been orange settle back into its place.

By then the light had gone.

She had not quite noticed it going. That was the way of it at this time of year. One minute it was dusk and you could see the point and the cottages and the shape of the hill behind them, and then you looked up from a rope and it was night, and the hill was only a place where there were no stars.

And the wind had dropped.

Not eased. Dropped. Whatever had been coming off the land had simply stopped, as if someone had shut a door on it, and the water, which had been shivering all evening, went smooth. Went flat. Went so still that when she lifted an oar and let one drop fall from the blade, she saw the ring it made go out, and out, and out.

Nell sat for a moment with both oars across her knees.

She should row home. She knew that. Hal would have the kettle filled and the lamp in the window and no particular worry, because she was never long, and the sea was flat, and the boat was called Patience. But it was so still. It was so very still, and the boat was drifting, very slightly, on what little tide there was, and it seemed a shame to argue with it.

So she let it.

She shipped the oars properly and leaned back against the stern seat with her coat pulled round her, and let the boat go where it liked.

The stars came out. Not all at once. The bright ones first, over the hill, and then the others filling in behind them, until the sky was thick with them, and the sea, being flat, took them and held them, so that she seemed to be sitting in the middle of a great dark bowl with stars above and stars below and one small wooden boat between.

She trailed a hand over the side. The water was cold and soft. Where her fingers went through it, it lit up, faintly, green, little sparks that came and went, and she moved her hand and watched them come and go, and thought that she had been doing this for thirty years and it still looked like a trick.

In the bow, the lobsters shifted in their box, and were quiet.

A long way off, so far that it was more a feeling than a sound, a bird called once over the water and did not call again. The point was a darker dark against the dark. The boat turned, slowly, all the way round, so that the hill went past her, and the open sea went past her, and the hill came back. The water said very small things against the hull.

She thought about nothing much. She thought about the lamp in the window and the kettle. She thought about the way Hal put a hand on the back of her neck when she came in, just for a moment, cold from the water, and said nothing, because nothing needed saying. She thought that she would be there soon. She thought that there was no hurry.

The boat drifted. The stars turned, very slightly, with it.

After a while, she could not have said how long, she sat up and took the oars.

It was not that anything had changed. The sea was as flat as it had been. But there is a moment, when you have sat still for long enough, when the sitting still is finished, and you know it, the way you know when a cup of tea is done. She turned the bow towards the harbour and began to row.

Slow strokes. Long ones. The oars went in without a splash and came out dripping green. The wake behind her was a line of small lights that closed up and went dark. She did not hurry. There was nothing to hurry for.

The harbour mouth came up out of the dark, the two walls and the gap between them. Inside, the water was blacker and stiller and smelled of rope and weed and diesel, which was the smell of home. The bigger boats stood along the wall. The gull had gone to bed.

And there, along the front, was the row of cottages, all dark now, every one of them, except for one.

One window. Yellow and square. The lamp on the sill, turned low, the way it always was. Nell rested on her oars and looked at it, and let the boat glide the last of the way in on its own.

The bow touched the slip. She stepped out into the shallow cold and pulled Patience up onto the stones, and took the box with the two lobsters and the fish, and tied the painter to its ring, and stood for a moment.

Behind her the sea lay flat and full of stars.

Then she went up the slip, and along the front, past the dark windows, to the one that was lit, and opened the door.

Inside, the kettle was just beginning to sing.